Seven Stanzas for a Doubtful Soul
by SodiumAzide
Summary: Mischa Summers always had issues with faith.  Not a good issue to have in the Brotherhood. His imperfect piety landed him in hot water and now he is stuck in the wastes, sullen escort to a zealous missionary.  Things of course go terribly wrong.
1. Chapter 1: In each Human heart

**1st Cant: In Each Human Heart**

It didn't matter if you were a eleven year old child or a scarhide veteran with a two hundred scalps on your belt. When you stepped through the doors of the Temple the first lesson was always in breath. As the Temple's mistress was fond of repeating. 'Control of the breath is control of the self'. If asked she would gleefully pontificate on the myriad of evolutionary reflexes that were linked to the breath then she would move on to the spiritual implications of respiration. She would wax poetic about energy and chi, will and intent.

On the most fundamental level, and for that matter, practical, breath was the ultimate interchange of energy between you and the world. Oxygen mediated life. It was through the extraordinary efficiency of aerobic respiration that the multicellular life was possible.

This seeming incongruity of purposes was quite shocking to the average initiate who came to those great ruby and onyx doors expecting hypnotic litanies of prayer or bone-breaking physical challenges. Those things did eventually come, along side the less expected lessons in philosophy, art and expression.

Here in the temple perfection was the goal.

It wasn't enough to create a supreme soldier. Soldiers could be created by shoving a rifle into a child's hands and filling their naive minds with promises of glory in another life or salvation by the benevolent hand of the messiah.

The goal was to create a person who could be many things, a knight in the service of Kane. Just in times of peace. A ruler and a protector. Terrible in times of war. Deadly, yes, but also cunning and learned.

Deep red light filtered down from the high set windows and the hall echoed with rapid panting breaths.

A soft melodious voice, subtly expressing menace and the possibility of salvation drifted between the kneeling disciples.

"Fear strikes at your breath. It paralyzes your lungs and stills you into a state of an animal quaking in the predator's shadow. You have all felt the almost subconscious freezing of your vital processes when you anticipate the possibility of failure. Even over something so trivial as a Hero's plight in some work of art or literature. Tension stills your breath. Fear stills the breath. Anticipation stills the breath." A sharp crack of bamboo on flesh echo through the hall. The mistress reminding her charges that attention must be paid or pain is the reward. Later on the strikes will be to distract and even later they will only be reminders but for now they serve as punishment. "The reverse is also true. Fear can be quieted, nervous anticipation quelled, tension dispelled if the aberrant breaths that serve as their handmaidens can be shooed from your lungs. Ruling your breath is ruling your mind. Do not make the mistake of thinking that your brain is somehow elevated from the flesh! Mind is servant to the body and body to mind, to even draw lines of distinction is foolish!"

The speech was grandiose and well rehearsed. A thousand times it had been given to a thousand supplicants. It had a well worn feeling in the mouth of Grand Abbess Taja Yadav, the words fit her tongue like a good pair of shoes. It was her favorite part of the whole induction.

_The Speech. _

It was part a harangue against the inevitable decadence that the filthy recruits would be dragging into her hallowed temple but mostly it was just a collection of practical wisdom. It was a distillation of her philosophy of life.

The Abbess described an elfin figure. Short glossy hair and teak skin wrapped in a shell of dark creaking leathers. A rich crimson sash fringed with heavy golden trim and an ebony rosary, each fat bead inscribed with the sacred scorpion marked her exalted position in the brotherhood.

Despite the majesty of her rank it was her face that was unforgettable and demanding of undivided attention. From the tip of her chin to edge of her hair line, from left ear to right, over the the curve of her lips, down the crook of her nose, even upon her eyelids, crawled a dense emerald script penned in no earthly alphabet. The secret speech of the Tacitus written upon her visage. If the eye was relaxed patterns in the scripture made themselves known. Whorls and spirals, jagged crests and deep troughs. Spells the ignorant whispered. A glamor on all who gazed upon her. Those that knew better whispered instead of the Marks of Awakening and the Path to Enlightenment. No one who knew of such things could gaze upon the Abbess without feeling their skin crawl. Without wondering how deep into bone and flesh the mysteries delved.

"Mischa" The Abbess spoke now not to the class but to one student. Calculated menace filled her tone even as she savored the sound of the name, relishing each syllable as if it were a sumptuous meal.

"Yes Mistress."

"Do you believe that you are wise?"

"No Mistress"

"Do you Believe that you are strong?"

"No Mistress"

"Do you believe yourself swift or agile?"

"No Mistress"

"Do you believe that you are a worm before the glory of the messiah?"

"Yes Mistress"

"Well at least you are listening, had you said 'no mistress' one more time I would have died of boredom. So now that we have established exactly how terrible and worthless you are in every category of existence, sentiments that I feel all your brothers and sisters here today would parrot with equally bland fervor, let me ask a question of some actual difficulty. Do you think you can handle difficulty?"  
>"Yes Mistress!"<p>

"Oh Excellent." Sarcasm dripped from the Abbesses voice. Her unexpectedly pink tongue slithered out and ran rapidly over the drawn outline of her mouth. "Just the well reasoned response I was expecting. How about you tell me what you do believe that you have that is worthy of being here under my legendary tutelage. And please, don't say 'my devotion' or 'my body' or any of the other banalities that ten thousand supplicants before you have eagerly offered up to me." Her whipcord form turned a carnivorous eye to the rest of the class. "And do not think that poor Mischa here is going to be alone in his public dissection. Here in the first days I plan to flense each and every one of you with exquisite care." Her cruel smile lit up her kaleidoscopic face. "You will sit on your knees till they are bloody, you will attempt to breath properly while I hit you repeatedly and I will preach to you wisdom that you are ill equipped to comprehend or even remember. Scattered as your minds are." She spun, rosary clattering and her heavy sash swirling with calculated drama. "So Mischa... impress me with you special talent, your unique qualification, your contribution to this great brotherhood."

The young man, a boy in truth, named Mischa Summers was sweating profusely. Even in the dark red light of the temple he glistened. His unnatural white hair was sodden and tangled and his sharp rat like features were twisted in concentration. He radiated an almost desperate desire not to fuck this up. So he opened his mouth and proceeded to do just that.

...

Mischa hadn't lost control of his breath.

The Abbess wouldn't have been proud, it took more that remembering the literal first lesson to make the old bitch proud, but it would at least have amused her to know that her most difficult student was at least that good. A faint smile painted his lips. He had never really fit in at the Temple.

It wasn't that he couldn't learn the lessons. He was a decent student, never the worst and usually only a little above or below the average. Certainly there were exceptions, he was one of the greater close range fighters in Temple memory and none living could matched the machined precision of his handwriting. However when it came to the more sophisticated layers of military strategy he was one of the Temple's greatest failures.

Still none of this really struck at the heart of it.

He had never managed to subsume his self into the will of Kane. A small part of him always stood apart and chirped irrelevant nonsense. The sort of nonsense would end up leading him astray at some crucial juncture. Preventing him from fully committing himself to the Blackest Hand.

An unpleasant liquid sensation ran over his forehead, down the side of his face welling around his ear before dripping into the wide shallow pool of mud that he was now halfway sunk in. Decay was thick in the air and it was difficult to ignore the scent of rotting meat. That was the first difficulty that his breathing was facing today. The second was the heavy weight that pressed down on his solar plexus. Both of these problems with his breathing had to do with being buried in a small mountain of corpses. Well... mountain was inappropriate.

It was more of a medium sized hillock.

He had heard that somewhere in Japan there was an entire hill comprised of the severed ears of people who had the unfortunate luck being born Korean when one Shogun or another had been in a conquering mood. They rolled a layer of sod over the ears and then put a temple on top of it. Somehow trapped in the tangle of emaciated corpses the thought of a mound of ears was comforting rather than disturbing. Ears were such silly things. Even knowing that the bloody handed warriors had carved them from men women and children, living and dead, conscripted levies and cowering peasants didn't do anything to lesson the sheer absurdity of an ear mound.

The tiny part of his brain that wouldn't shut up wondered whether or not his semi-coherent ramblings were a coping mechanism or if he was just sick in the head. Black humor was one thing but he was sharing space with corpses he had a good deal of responsibility in creating. Each of the bodies bore meticulously placed bullet wound upon their brow and he might as well have held the guns.

...

It had begun a week ago when he and the mission he was attached to had shown up in the bleak yellow zone ruins of a little town outside of what once was San Antonio. The Confessor that lead them was a dour middle aged man who had taken the name Ezekiel as a sign of devotion after a midlife conversion. He had a bad habit of taking off in wild impassioned sermons about the decadence and evils of heretics and infidels but he was kind to children and mothers regardless of their faith and never once turned away a starving zoner without at least a bottle of clean water a full belly and a stack of MRE's to take back to whatever kin they had left. Sure he also made sure they left with a copy of 'The Ascendance' as well as countless tracts detailing the Gospels of Kane. He was a missionary and that was what missionaries did.

Zeke had his own little preachy staff. Uptight seminary types. Mischa's side of the operation was composed of militants of the slightly less than fanatical persuasion. Like attracted like it seemed. Victor, Duncan, Xia who on strange occasions preferred to be called Sarah, Arnold, Maria, Emilo, Sven and Mitzi. had been culled from the seething throngs of disaffected idiots known as general recruitment and formed around Mischa.

In the Brotherhood rank was formal up to a point, but much of the combat doctrine was based around improvisation and flexibility. Militants tended to follow whoever was yelling at them at the moment. After a while it tended to narrow down to the same set of faces yelling and they developed preferences. A Cabal as these groups were called usually formed around a Confessor or a Brother of exceptional charisma or someone of rank out and out told the militants where they were supposed to be.

Either way it was one guy who did the leading and a bunch of guys who followed him for whatever reason. It was a highly informal arrangement and often you would have floaters. Militants who would drift from one Cabal to another. They called it maintaining ties. Most of the rest called them weasels.

True commanders. Those ordained from on high or those who rose below learned the names and faces of those underneath them who had cabals at their command, those that got things done. Generally it was in this way that business was conducted. At least until word came down from exalted circles that shit that needed doing wasn't getting done. At that point Black Hand would descend on the situation and 'sort it out' often with extreme prejudice.

Things got more formal when armor and air assets started getting involved. Allot more saluting and certainly more titles, but one of the central goals of the Brotherhood was to create a globe spanning organization that was entirely self propagating. The various factions policed each other and sought the guidance of the inner circle but were by in large exceptionally independent. Mischa had once quipped that it was ''Franchised World Domination". The Grand Abbess had laughed demurely behind one hand and then proceeded to break his jaw as a lesson in when to be silent.

Ezekiel's Cabal was one of the better missionary cabals operating in Y-6. They brought scores and scores of the faithless into the light. Incited fanatic commitment to the brotherhood from those that previously only gave Kane lip service.

The volunteer numbers from Ezekiel's Parish were extraordinarily high. For his success it was decided, by an Abbot or some militant Brother-Captain, that the Black Hand of Kane needed to show their support for Confessor Ezekiel. An blessed warden to help him walk the righteous path. So Mischa Summers Knight of Kane, Annointed of the Temple,Warrior Monk of the Black Hand and favored Student of the Grand Abbess Taja Yadav herself was chosen to shepherd the good man on his sojourns.

The perfect task to occupy the time of a man who wasn't exactly in the highest favor.

A task that ended up being an exceptional bore.

The cabal humped from one flyspeck to another in a convoy of dilapidated buggies that would have been considered scrap metal during the second Tiberium War. In each little encampment often populated by no more than 5 or 6 gaunt from severe starvation wasteland families the gaunt from a severe faith Confessor would hear their sins, make judgments on land and property, hand out provisions, tiberium technology, weapons and give a rousing sermon from The Book. Note the significant capitalization there.

On an intellectual level Mischa understood that this strange nomadic pattern of nurture, support and connection building was in essence how the Brotherhood's government over much of the world functioned. Thousands of these waste land enclaves visited by thousands of confessors provided a background support that made the yellow zones home turf for Nod. Taken with the endless supply of fanatic militants pouring from the festering urban hives and the material support of the Nod aligned war lords and you had an almost complete picture of how the brotherhood functioned. The Order of the Black hand was the final component. The glue that bound the diaspora into unity. The voice of Kane and the origin of the One Vision and One Purpose of liturgical fame.

Understanding the practical reality of his mission did little to assuage a bone deep irritation.

Mischa had come so close to being above all this, to being a real player. If things had been a little different he could be enjoying a better life. Mischa was however introspective enough to understand that he would probably never be happy, no matter what the situation. For him bliss only came when he was wrapped up in a challenging task and in that aspect his current situation was a spectacular failure. An endless march of boredom.

It wasn't that he wanted to be on the front lines screaming the glory of Kane.

No. He had had his fill of the front lines.

He never wanted to be there again.

Not ever.

It was just that he wished...

Well he wished for interesting times.

...

"Raise your wrist. Control comes from the wrist. Each stroke must be precise but swift. Hesitation ruins the composition, it betrays the amateur. It is better to be confident and wrong than to appear to be unsure. Weakness is forgivable, it is the nature of humanity to be weak. It is the thoughtless display of this natural weakness that we seek to stamp out. You can share the misgivings in your heart with your confessor your lover and your goddamn mother but you are to be an exemplar! An icon. Even if you are wrong you cannot allow it to seem like you are anything but absolutely certain.

"As the more introspective among you have already realize this begets a problematic dynamic. If you cannot be seen to err then how can you correct yourself? How can you make realistic evaluations of a dynamic situation and allow for your own mistakes?" She paused to let the question percolate, then continued, "The answer is that you cannot and that, IT! DOES! NOT! MATTER!.

"There is uncertainty in every corner of every room. It is a constant companion to each and every one of us. Whether we acknowledge it or not, it is an unchangeable fact! No amount of self reflection and recrimination will change this. It will not even ameliorate the INEVITABLE damage. Instead all you can hope to do is forge forward. Make a single confident decision for each problem as it comes to you. It does not matter if you completely reverse your position between one day and the next as long as you never show hesitation. Hearts and minds are just as important as land and resources. What's more the most important mind, the most important heart, are your own.

"Do not allow the demons of self doubt to sap the the strength of your strong arm!" Her arm was held high, hand splayed to heaven. "Faith and FURY!" The high hand closed into a fist. "Power over the heart and mind!" The fist touched forehead and breast. "Peace of the soul through power of the will." The hand was open again and sweeping out to encompass the class. "Peace through Power!"

It was a rant.

Grand Abbess Yadav was in full swing now. What had begun as a simple commentary on form had spun into a spontaneous diatribe on the nature of their existence.

Mischa supposed that this was one of her strengths as Headmistress. It lent a certain organic quality to the classes that she dropped in on. Other instructors actually did the teaching of form and the Abbess would float from class to class offering corrections and insights. Often hijacking the entire lesson to deliver a message that she felt was important to the development of her beloved students. Mischa could certainly admit that it was inspiring, albeit in a rather demagogic manner. She had an easy charisma and an off handed mastery of all the skills her charges fumbled to learn.

Still, the tiny voice that whispered doubt and suspicion in Mischa's hear wondered if it was really appropriate that she deliver this sort of grand speech in the middle of a calligraphy lesson. It was a god damn class on how to draw letters on a piece of expensive paper.

Paper for fuck's sake!

No one used paper anymore. It was a dead skill. Smart paper and ubiquitous computerization meant that even an illiterate could compose complex works of prose or poetry. Which was a good thing given the average level of education in the Zones was essentially nil.

The Zones.

What GDI casually triaged away as Yellow Zones were in reality so much more complex. It wasn't a place defined by its tiberium infestation, it was many different places defined by many different people. People of a thousand stripes once allied in the grand old world coalitions called nations. Struggling to maintain their meager existences. Farming with home made hydropontics because the omnipresent ground poisons leeched into all food grown in the wastes. Eating soil grown food because there was never enough clean food to go around. In the zones life was a endless series of multiple choice questions that had no right answer. You were lucky if you lived past 35.

Mischa's family had been relatively well off as Zoners went. They owned enough guns to keep the neighbors at bay and had a 'pont big enough to support both their children if not themselves. Both of them were chronic asthmatics like every Zoner over twenty. Microscopic tiberium shards that swirled up on the dust storm that kicked out of the barrens were embedded in everyone's lungs and eventually you either went into spontaneous respiratory failure or developed a chronic wheeze and watched your health slowly spiral downward. Mischa's parents hadn't been exceptionally devout people, they kept a shrine to Kane in the back of the house but it was for their children that they went to the Temple every seventh day and served.

The Priests of Nod understood that in the Zones there was no escape from Tiberium. The green shale was a slow choking death for any human without the good fortune to be born into the Pre-tiberium dreamland of the Blue Zones. The fantasy playground that GDI Supported on the bowed spines and impoverish shoulders of the Yellow Zoners. The only sane option was exaltation of the mortal shell. Divination into a form that was no longer vulnerable to the green death. To become more than human, to search for perfection. It had been too late for Stasja and Daniel Summers, they had come to the faith too late in life, both of them already had the viridian pox in their lungs. Creeping through their guts.

Despite their impending death's a hope for their children brought them to the Temple of Nod where Mischa and Natasia were given the baptism of Kane

If you asked Mischa whether it would be better to live with parents or with tiberium rot he would have been a long time in answering.

Mexico City was a hive before the great fall of civilization and a hive that was none to kind to the children at that. After the fall it was a seething maw with too many teeth, always hungry, always desperate, dying by bits even as the stupendous birth rates made their valiant attempts at staunching the bleed

Those that lived in the tangle would do just about anything to escape, to be saved, and the Brotherhood was always there hidden in the bustle, helping hand extended. To gift the masses with hope and life.

Mischa always thought that there was no mystery in the Messianic vision most of the zoners had of Kane. They were all lost in the land of Nod. Exiled from the eden of the Blue Zones.

Mischa the urchin had always been thankful for the shelter of the Temples. Mischa the young man had been thankful for the purpose and Mischa the adult had given up body and if not all, at least two thirsrds of his soul in the service of Kane.

Ever since he was a child he had had a deep faith in three things. His body, his _location,_ and in people. It was not in Kane or in any other divine agency that Mischa put his faith. Rather, he invested in the webwork of human beings that composed his Brotherhood in Nod.

It was simple equation. He just couldn't bring himself to _believe. _He was pathologically unable to commit to the mysticism that surrounded the Messiah. Certainly Kane himself was a mystery. How was it possible that he kept on coming back? It seemed supernatural. Then again so did Tiberium, thinking machines and insect aliens who could teleport and phase solid matter and yet all of them were frighteningly real.

Faith was always something that the young boy had in people and objects. Not concepts. Faith that some quecha punk was going to try and stab him, faith that there wasn't going to be any dinner tonight, faith that his crew could sneak into a 'pont and a snatch some food. The brotherhood took care of its own and would accept any that came to its door, Mischa had faith in that. He also had faith that GDI wouldn't accept a scrawny zoner with tiberium scales dusting his ribs into their ranks. It wasn't really even faith, though he used the word because it seemed right. Instead it was a knowledge, a certainty that could not be confirmed but he understood with unshakable perfection to be true.

So he had knelt at the alter, mouthed prayers to Kane and lied when asked if he believed.

His career as a child soldier for the brotherhood was filled with the sort of banal horrors that can be expected of any profession that regularly brought one into contact with death.

Mischa had quickly learned that being a deft pickpocket and a superb liar were career skills in the shifting and often lethal politics of the militant branch of the Brotherhood. It was a shock to go from the helping hands and quiet devotion of the temples to the fervor and hatred of the Soldiers of Kane. He had not been quite so happy with the jobs that had been tasked to him. The whisper cough of a shredder pistol and the ragged gurgle of someone trying to breath blood became background noise.

The Brothers Militant had learned early on that most GDI soldiers were hesitant to shoot children and exploited that flaw to the utmost.

It wasn't long before Mischa, Julian, Tiffany and all the other little Soldiers of Kane were sneaking into blue zones with Pre-fall disney princess backpacks stuffed with pipe bombs and shaped bombs were for the malls and clubs. Shaped charges for molding into wolverine and titan leg joints or on the underside of the robotic harvesters as they trundled to the yellow zone tib fields.

GDI was understandably paranoid about their defenses but they constantly fell short in the imagination department. A GDI Colonel who had cut his teeth in TW2 fighting legions of Tanks and foot soldiers, scrapping from building to building, calling in air strike and orca raids wasn't mentally equipped for the slow 'peacetime' pressure that the brotherhood inflicted on GDI holdings. They could shout and call it terrorism all they wanted to but it was the underdog's privilege to engage in 'asymmetrical warfare'.

Desperation and hatred led cabals to innovate in their methods. Children had been a good idea, the dogs had been an even better one. They were fast and silent and even a feral cur could be trained into a well guided missile if you knew how. All it took was a few simple electrodes, a collection of microchips burned with an easily acquired set of programs, a bone saw, a knowledge of canine anatomy and a strong stomach.

It was strange. The actual killing never haunted him. It was the other things. The things that came between the killing. He had lots of nightmares to keep his nights interesting. Nightmares about his deeds, nightmares about his brothers and sisters, both living and dead. Nightmares about the dogs.

The dog nightmares were a special kind of terrible.

...

Ezekiel called a halt in a town called Boerne. At least that was what the ancient roadsigns declared it.

Dust from Red-7, rich with tib particles and pregnant with supercharged ions blew in heavy from the north. Sinister Seven was what they called the massive cancer that sat in the heartlands of the former United States. Everyone was wearing their flak jumpers with matching respirator masks to shield their delicate pink innards from the malignant clouds. Mischa was wearing his full Black Hand Plate and was enjoying the relative comfort of the hermetically sealed armor.

The tall crown like helm on the confessor bobbed as he navigated through the cracked asphalt maze of the town. There was a large underground settlement here, another stop on the tour, a couple hundred families. Close to a thousand souls in all.

"Hey Mish you think that they are gonna have real fruit here? " The call buzzed over the closed circuit laser comms net. Sounded like either Emilo or Sven. They were visually as different as was possible, one a swarthy peruvian the other a pale nord but both of them had grown up together in Rio and shared an identical Brazilian lilt and a favella slush vocabulary. Neither of them cared to address him by his proper title of Friar Summers, or even by the less formal Brother Mischa and he did not care to correct them. He didn't even care to have their respect.

"Likely they have it, but likely you won't see any!" Xia's aussie twang chirped brightly.

"Real fruit can go the way of the rest of the old world." Mitzi had a sultry alto rumble which was at odds with her bubbly name but perfectly in line with her heavy frame and "classic" figure, "I'd much rather see some twinkies. I heard those wrappers are greensealed."

Now Victor added his voice,

"Nothing from the before was greensealed! Thats an legend, twinkies are just so naturally toxic no one could tell the difference!"

A clamor of hooting interjections and wit of varying quality lit up the commband.

Discipline was normally lax in irregular units but Mischa who was officially in charge couldn't be bothered to even make a half hearted showing in keeping his men in line. Ezekiel would have put his foot down and given everyone a good tongue lashing. He and his three acolytes were completely humorless and ascetic but he didn't have access to the militants comms channel. He thought that he did but Emilo and Sven shared more than just a culture. They also shared a passion for cryptography and had monkeyed with the math of Confessors crypt algorithms and dropped him stealthily from the loop. The rest of the militants abused this privacy to no end.

"I am more concerned with those reports of a GDI HK squad operating in this area. The pony wire wasn't all that specific and that makes me nervous." That was Duncan his Brother-Sergeant.

The pony wire was the name the Brothers Militant gave to the massive courier network that Nod used to spread military intelligence. The brave young men and women of the express drove, flew and ran a eclectic collection of irregular vehicles, beaming Line of Sight laser comms messages to and from concealed towers and emitters. Any of Nod's Militant or Black Hand forces could pull the collected intelligence reports off these towers and put their own up onto the pony wire. The relays were normally completely silent to prevent detection but if you had a really important message it would intermittently ping an open air broadcast announcing its priority cargo. The reverse was also true and the wire they had crossed a few days ago contained dire warnings about a particularly brutal group of of Zone Raiders that was operating in and around Sinister Seven. The wire had be painfully vague on the disposition or mission of the Raiders but these days Scrin hunting was the automatic assumption.

Arnold finally broke his silence.

"HK squads aren't going to concern themselves with a rag tag band like ours, not unless we pop our heads up and start making a ruckus. I am a lot more concerned about whatever they are hunting. If its visceroids or floaters then things will be okay but if its Scrin remnants? Well thats a whole different story. Anyone recall Chicago?"

There was abrupt silence over the channel. The Chi Town conflict had been grisly, a real slaughterhouse, Mischa knew that Mitzi and Arnold had friends in the Chicago theater. Or rather had once had friends in the theater. They all had the seen the grainy footage of a Scrin Skinny almost curiously vivisecting one screaming man after another. No one could look on that sort of detached cruelty without understanding why GDI called them Ravagers.

"No one has forgotten Chicago mate." Victor was somber. "how bout once we get the preacher man well settled into his digs down in the mole town we run a little recon job and settle everyones fears."

The rest of the crew chimed in with approval. War by democracy. Brother-Sergent Duncan's respirator obscured face swiveled to catch Mischa's eye, or rather the optics array on his helm. Disapproval flashed through his bright blue irises like a laser blast. Duncan was old school Militant with over twenty five years of service to Kane. Veteran of two Tiberium Wars and a countless brushfire conflicts. If Kane was his first god then Discipline was close second. He was dissatisfied, to put it mildly, with Mischa's laissez faire command style and though he was too good a soldier to publicly chew out his officer he was a relentless harpy in private. Mischa was frankly bored by him.

"Sounds decent. Though I think that we shouldn't push it too far. We have to remember that even if we find a serious threat we don't have anything that can handle it. Our best defense is not being discovered and even a careful con job runs the risk of the scout being detected." Mitzi was always practical and level headed. Her reasoning was solid as usual, uninspired but solid The entire squad began to noisily voice their approval of her plan. Mischa saw the burning glower that shone from Duncan's brilliant baby blues intensify and his rough voice came crashing across the channnel.

"PEOPLE! Despite the illusion that you have constructed concerning your place in this world we are going to do this MY way! As soon as the 'fessor is situated I want every one of you to start securing the city. A house by house sweep no less. I want you to familiarize yourself with the terrain we are in now not go humping out into the barrens in search of a Hunter Killer team that could take you apart with a violent sneeze or a Scrin horror show that might not even notice it was killing you. While you are doing this the Friar and I are going to spend a little time patching into the Pony Wire and see if we can get any extra info on these Hunter Killers and their target.

"If we determine that there is only a minor threat profile then we can all relax a little and see if they actually do have real fruit or Twinkie's if thats what you prefer. If we have the slightest chance that this could turn ugly we are going to booby trap this whole city and then bunker down and pray that no one notices. Under no circumstances are we going to engage in any long range con job." He swept his hands around him in theatrical emphasis "Do you see that Venom support hovering overhead? Do you hear the rustle of our Shadow's lurking in the eaves? Do you smell the burnt rubber of our Bikes? I sure don't! And attempting to do visual recon of the fucking desert using a goddamn refurbished dune buggy when all the possible threats we are facing have omnidirectional lidar, magnetic echo systems, IR snoopers and god knows what else is not just stupid it's suicidal. Or might I remind you that we aren't here on combat duty. We are fucking babysitters!"

Mischa placed a gentle hand on his Sergeant. "Brother" He spoke in soft tones. "We understand." Then he dropped off the comms and spoke the next words quietly into Duncan's ears.

"I don't mind you running the squad, in fact I think you are probably a much better leader than I am and undoubtedly a better battle commander." He tilted his head in deference. " I have never labored under any illusions about my use to this squad. I am a figure head here, a morale booster. But you are going to learn that there are limits to how far you can go. I don't give a shit about how you dispose of the rest of the cabal but you never tell them what I am going to be doing, even if you phrase it as a suggestion, you don't presume to command me. I am here out in this fucking wilderness guarding this hump of a priest only because I got caught in the middle of some politics. You're a vet. You should know what sticky, hard-to-wash-out shit politics is."

"I didn't know that... Sir," he put a harsh emphasis on the title, 'and I don't presume to know what got you here... Sir." Contempt was thick in the Brother Seargent's voice.

Within his mask Mischa sighed. He had never had any skill at intimidation. He could charm the pants off just about anyone, and had done just that with most of his more attractive class mates back at the Temple, but his attempts to coerce always ended with him looking the fool.

"Just tend to your men brother. I will dispose of myself."

"You do just that... Sir." Duncan turned his back on his nominal officer and walked back towards his men, voice popping back up on the comms. "Lets get inside double time! I smell an ion storm on the air. Hup hup!"

The cabal moved quickly, chastised but still subtly defiant. You couldn't ever really get a solid position of authority over these sorts of independent operators. Not like the boot camp trained militants that had been churned out during the wars. Meat robots, programed with mindless zeal and pumped up on combat drugs. Zone Runners like these were flexible and adaptable and as a result unruly.

As they entered into the hollowed out building that served as the entrance to the mole town Mischa let himself fall behind, quietly diminishing his steps and letting the other go on ahead. He wasn't in the mood to play patty cake with the locals while Ezekiel ran through his checklist of righteousness.

Duncan had put him in a foul mood.

Once he was certain they were gone ahead he stole back up the tunnel and into an empty corner of the ruins. Standing in the remains of a tacky living room he worked a thick armored finger up into the neck joint of the armor and popped the release. A hiss of compressed air sounded loudly in the darkness. Climate control and dust filters aside, he hated wearing this walking coffin. Cursing at his sergeant and his bad luck to even be here Mischa ripped the helmet free exposing his sweaty head to a cool current of air running up from the mole town. The cape, curiass and vambraces came next. Piece by piece he stripped himself of his armor until he was clad only in the sheer skin suit beneath.

He wasn't supposed to be here. He wasn't supposed to be just another Friar in the Black Hand.

She had told him that he was destined for great things. That he was going to change the world. A bitter and slightly hysterical laugh bubbled up from his lungs as he violently wrenched the pieces of his armor into their storage configuration.

He needed to get out and run.

He needed to remind himself who he was. What he was.

They had taken much when they exiled him to this flyspeck but there was so much more that they couldn't ever take away. Long loping strides took him rapidly beyond the edge of the city once called Rome. The badlands stretched out forever and beyond the horizon he could see the eerie ion storms that hovered permanently over Red Seven. He squinted and let his vision fall through the infra red spectrum. Duncan was right, you didn't do long recon unless you had the right equipment. But he didn't know Mischa half as well as he thought he did. The pale white haired man smiled a thin smile.

Fuck Duncan. He was going to have some fun.

Gathering up hundred odd kilos of armor like a bundle of discarded socks Mischa marched out of the darkness and into the open air. Heedless of the tiberium winds he heaved the armor into a rusted dumpster. He could get it later, and if anyone was foolish enough to try and steal it... well the Scorpion was venomous indeed.

...

Taja Yadav never yelled. She hissed and crackled like fire. Rumbled and threatened like a storm over the horizon, and murmured soft groaning threats like a mountain before an avalanche. If her intimidations didn't bring about the required corrections she moved quickly into violence. When you pushed too hard or stepped out of line she punished with brutality and cruelty, inflicting deep wounds to serve as a lasting reminder. On the mats she was just the opposite. Chivalrous and restrained, patient and even gentle, she would spar a thousand times and never leave you with more than a light bruise.

Mischa was just shy of nineteen and had been at the temple for three years now. The Holy Skorpios that he had gotten tattooed on his left arm to mark him as a Brother of Nod now had its matching counterpart. The Mark of the Hand showed to be a Monk of the Order, strong right hand of the Messiah. Black Hand of Kane.

He had gotten the skorpios when he was fourteeen. He had been jazzed out of his mind on adrenalin and stimulants, blind stinking drunk sitting in a fox hole while GDI swept the outskirts of Boston for the unknown assassin who had slit the throat of the Deputy Secretary of Agriculture in her posh high rise apartment. Confessor James had cracked open the vodka and had Acolyte Small start on the Mark of the Brotherhood with Director Karen Thortons blood still spattered on his arms.

The Mark of the Hand was given under much more somber circumstances. Scribed with exquisite care by the Prior of Names in the Grand Hall in front of all the assembled Brothers. The air had been rich with incense and the Brothers chanted hymns to sanctify the occasion. That sort of pomp and circumstance bored Mischa, he would have fallen asleep save for the face that tiberium weave tattooing was painful beyond description. He had worked the fuck out of the Abbess's breath control to keep from showing his agony.

Block, parry, riposte.

Strike, evade, strike.

There was a rhythm to close ranged combat. A meeting of two people and the achievement of balance between them. Both parties pushed and pulled, receded from their foe and flowed into the empty spaces that presented themselves. Mischa couldn't help but ponder how intimate the whole affair was. His open palm scissored inwards and glanced off the abbesses bare shoulder, their sweat mixed and she writhed with fluid speed, twisting the energy of her evasion into a strike that drove the breath from his lungs.

She always had favored body shots.

"Better! Much better my son." Blows flickered between them, "I can count the number of humans that can lay hands upon me on the fingers of my hands." High and low, "We take baby steps to enlightenment." She whirled about and lashed him across the stomach. "Now let us try once more and this time when you throw your weight into reckless offense make sure you harness the excess of explosive force and already have your next move underway."

Mischa would have responded with a 'thank you mistress, but fuck you mistress' if he could. Instead he focused on suppressing the panic that was rising in his chest. He kept himself loose and his maneuvering smooth as he calmly fought to regain his breath. Even now it shocked him how rapidly conditioning and method could overwhelm the body.

The Abbess spoke in a rapid manner when actually teaching, as if she didn't want to waste time on any speech that wasn't grandiose scenery chewing spectacle, yet Mischa had regained his breath and stance before more than a handful of words had left her lips. He waited politely for her to reach the end of her thought then threw a viscous sucker punch at her throat and swept her legs out from under her.

"Abbess. I heard rumors floating around the Temple that you are considering me for _The Program_." The Abbess bent like a willow away from the throat shot and used the movement of his sweep to whip her entire body into a whirling spin, lashing out with one slender foot to catch him again in the solar plexus.

"You have good ears Mischa." God she hit hard. "It is wise to listen to the whispers of your fellows. But do make sure that you do not develop a reputation as a gossip! 'Loose lips sink ships' as they say." Mischa was ready for the body strike. He bent and faded backwards pushing the Abbess's foot with both arms, adding wild momentum to her movement, preventing her from bringing her leg back under control. As she spiraled down to the mats he leaped forward driving a strong reversed punch into her exposed short ribs.

"So is that a yes Abbess? Am I being considered for commando training? Officially it doesn't even exist and unofficially you have nothing to do with it. Still a little bird told me that you have trained every Commando the brotherhood has fielded since before the Second War." Mischa wasn't sure how it happened, but like a cat the Abbess twisted under his blow and it found no purchase on her sweat slick skin. Spray rained from her short sodden hair as a corkscrew form took her to a safe distance.

She came up smiling. Which was a bad sign. He peeled back lips and mask of tattoos described a devils visage.

Faster than he had ever seen anyone move the abbess pounced upon him raining blows in a dizzying flurry.

"My son has been snooping has he?" Blows stippled his arms. Walking pain up towards his neck, "My son uncovers things that are best left hidden." she cut at him with knife hands, stomped at the inner calves, "But my son is wise enough to tell me that he has been misbehaving and now hopes to be rewarded for his transgressions." She laughed. A high musical thing that echoed between the meaty slaps of her ongoing assault. "My son knows me well. Here in the Sanctum of Kane we practice holy deception." An uppercut nicked his jaw and rattled teeth. "You have indeed risen in my estimation." Desperately Mischa wove a defense against her blows. Her style had shifted, no more leggy spins and lancing hand strikes. She thrust herself inside his guard hooking punches and elbow strikes while her legs shuffled mechanically occasionally slinging a knee or shin kick and his legs of stomach. Well two could play that game. If she wanted to shift them game from the third circle to the second then he could shift it from second to first!

"It wasn't my intention to impress Abbess." He made no attempts to attack. He bore out her punishments. "I am honestly interested in whether you feel I am suitable for that exalted service to Kane." Mischa was waiting for the abesss to flag. "Exactly how many Commando's have ever lived? A hundred? Two hundred at most?" It was coming, a slight slackening of her pace. He had to let her grow tired. "To be even considered for such a honor is immensely flattering." Npw! He relaxed and let an incoming hook slip inside his defenses. The blow hurt but he could easily handle the pain. Quick and sure he fastened his hands onto the abbess and brought both of them crashing to the mat. He over topped her by a head and a half and had far more mass. They were both slender but where she was petite he was wiry. Bearing down he trapped her striking arm and snaked his legs around her torso. Now all he had to do was squeeze her precious breath from her. So squeeze he did. His thighs tightened to iron consistency and his lower back cried with the sweet strain of it. Taja's breath hissed from her in sibilant exhalation.

"Mischa!" Her shout was unexpected, but not nearly so unexpected as her free hand buffeting his ear. He wasn't quite sure how or why but his vision exploded into stars and he felt his skeleton melt into gelatinous consistency. When vision returned he found that he was missing time. His internal clock, a standard bit of implanted wetware, told him that he was missing 15 seconds of consciousness. The Abbess stood over him a satisfied grin quirking her features.

"What?" That was all he could think to say. He tentatively brought his hand to his ear, testing for damage. The real shock was that his ear didn't even have the boxed soreness one could expect after being hit by a heavy blow. A faint electric numbness was the only evidence that the abbess had struck him. Grand Abbess Yadav extended an open hand her midnight fingernails glinting in the moody red light.

"Ah my son, there are more mysteries in this ever changing world than you would believe. Would that you had more faith in miracles you wouldn't be so confused all the time." Her emerald eyes shined unnaturally in the shadowed recesses of her face. In a moment of shock he realized there was no reflection, instead the light came from within those menacing orbs. "Just remember that miracles are not confined to the realm of light and salvation. Dark miracles and the damnation they bring are just as important to the will of Kane." Mischa's shaking hand clasped the abbess's and he haltingly dragged himself into a sitting position.

"Miracles are all well and good but it is your judgment that matters and you I put my faith in. We can talk endlessly about the will of Kane but it is your will that decides who makes the cut or doesn't." Mischa grimaced and rubbed his tingling jaw. "Do you think I am ever going to beat you?" The Abbess laughed.

"You are looking at things from a perspective too close to the ground. Do you think that I am fully aware of why I do anything? There is always a mystery to some actions. The feeling in your gut that says 'no this is unsafe' or 'I trust him'. Even beyond the Will of Kane that exists in these hidden places in our hearts there is a Will of Nod that affects causality. The simple minded among your brothers expect the parting of seas or loaves into fishes." She snorted a rude laughter. "These are gaudy miracles of the charlatan king and show nothing more than a vulgar illusion. True divine will lives in the chance encounters, the split second decisions and the subtle coincidences of our world." She reached across the gap between them and tapped his breast. "Think on this my son. After fifty years of defeats and oppression the brotherhood has persisted and finally grasped the only victory that ever mattered. What strange symmetry that is. To survive by the skin of our teeth through so many tribulations only to have the promised day come at the hand of our most mortal of enemies. Victory gifted to us by GDI. Is it simple coincidence and our perseverance, or is it Divine will that that guided our failures as well as our successes "

The Abbess rose from her crouch and walked to the shrine that dominated the training hall. She bowed once in respect then lifted the Black Blade of Kane from its sacred rack. The sheath was enameled with a lacquer that perfectly matched the abbess's fingernails and deep red tassels hung from the hilt. She folded up into a formal mediation the sheathed sword laying across her lap. Mischa instinctively mirrored the posture.

"Abbess?"

"Shush for a moment my son. I will speak again in good time. For now I want you to see the sword of Kane. I want you to think upon it and ask what lessons it has to teach."

With that she slowly withdrew the blade from its sheath. Mischa was surprised when the tip emerged. The blade was short barely filling a quarter of the scabbard. It was a smoky black and from it shone tiberium runes glowing a harsh green. As Mischa gazed upon it he realized that it wasn't metal, it was some form of plastic or carbon fiber and the hilt was simply silk and wood. It was thin and double edged and capped with a chisel point and it gleamed wetly with a dark oil. They both stared at the blade, breathing slowly and with deliberate purpose. To Mischa the Tacitan runes scribed on the blade seemed to bleed into the surrounding material, creating a fuzzy halo that blurred the line where one substance began and the other ended.

It was near an hour before the Abbess softly spoke.

"The Blade of Kane is not what is expected of it. It is short where it is expected to be long, light where it is expected to be heavy. Venomous where it is thought to be inert and it is not forged of metal, it is forged of the same carbon that gives birth to all living things. Within this living frame lies tiberium veins. We place it on our altar as a symbol. As a reminder of the war like function that we must all fulfill in the pursuit of out duties. We never unsheathe it save in front of those inducted to the mysteries of Kane for to unveil it is to rob it of its power. It is a divine weapon not because it is exceptionally effective or blessed by Kane or Nod. It is divine because it is a symbol of what we seek to be." Slowly she returned the blade to its scabbard and slowly and with infinite reverence returned it to the shrine. "When you complete your training here I will hand you badges and honors, uniforms and symbols of rank. Then I will give you two gifts one will be contained in scabbard much like this one with a hilt and tassels much like the one you see here, the other will be a scroll of Kane's wisdom held in a case of suspiciously similar dimensions to the blade you just saw. If you find that everything about these gifts is what you expected then I will never see you again and I wish you luck in you endeavors. If you find that once again the blade of Kane is not what you expect then perhaps there are deeper mysteries still for you to discover."

...

It was a storm.

As Ion Storms went it was not so terrible. No more than a category II however there was no comparing it to the storms of old earth. It lashed the landscape with brilliant energy. Hundreds of bolts of weird lightning spilled out of the red clouds and the crackling energy of the storm front above was reflected in the tiberium fields that stretched out below. The ion discharges would ricochet from one terminal to another. Cloud to field and field to cloud then back to the super storm that hung permanently over Red-7. The very air was charged with untapped power. If your stuck your tongue out you would feel a faint electric tingle from the tiberium dust that floated on the air, reflecting the fury of the storm.

Mischa rode low and fast ahead of the storm, he wore a simple mask of indeterminate origin and his sleeveless undershirt showed clean unmarked shoulders. His bike was a civilian model stamped with neither Nod nor GDI markings. The bike he had found in an abandoned cache a mile out of town. He had spent the better part of a day patching it up. It was cathartic to create something and he found the labor honest and rewarding. The bike was almost entirely mechanical running off the sort of archaic of a solid state fuel block that, had tiberium fuels not become ubiquitous, would be the pinnacle of human technology. That was 30 years ago and now this marvel was no more than a junk heap worthy relic. Of course it was just the sort of crap that a unaligned zoner would be forced to use. Which was good because that was exactly what Mischa was pretending to be.

He had left a message on the Commchan that he was going to do long recon and that Duncan was in command till he returned.

The terrain whipped past him had nearly two hundred clicks and hour. Recklessly fast for a normal humans with human reflexes and human eyes but understandable if one was trying to outrun an Ion Storm. It was a ruse of course. Mischa could have fallen asleep at 200 kph and not crashed the bike. Hell at double the speed he would still have been well within his control range. Of course this piece of crap couldn't hit even close to 400 kph. Among land vehicles only Sidewinder Attack Bikes with their supreme aerodynamics, tiberium power cells and massive throbbing engines could hit that sort of speed. To properly maintain control at those reckless velocities the brotherhood made sure that its bikers had eyes and nerves to match the extreme nature of their vehicle.

Mischa wasn't a biker but he oh was he wired. He was beyond wired. He was custom tooled. And he had a performance profile that would make a veteran attack biker weep with envy.

He had been riding hard for near two days now in a ever expanding spiral with its center in the laughable ruin of a strip mall that served as a downtown to Boerne. Take that with the day he spent getting the bike into working order and he had been alone for three blissful days.

Away from Ezekiel and his rote pieties and Duncan and his worries and inflexible need to enforce his will. He could have tolerated the rest of 'his' militants but he had never even in his youth been 'one of the lads'. It was an effort to keep up the facade of camaraderie and he infinitely preferred being alone with his own thoughts.

He missed the temple.

The Grand Abbess was never fun to be around but she certainly was exhilarating. He missed his brothers and sisters of the Hand. They always had minds and with the sisters bodies to match. These militants were canny enough and competant at their jobs but there was no spark to them. No flair. And at the risk of sounding a bit shallow none of the sisters were quite up to par. Xia was cute enough but he was pretty certain that they played for the same team and the rest just weren't even worth it. It was almost peaceful out here even with the brewing storm and constant dust clouds.

Over the last days he had discovered that there were several small Riparius fields around the town but only one had a blossom tree at its heart. None of them were tactically all that significant though he had spotted a couple of Forgotten mutants harvesting Tib by hand, loping in and out of one of their rat holes. He had almost stopped to quiz them but you never knew how tiberium mutation would affect the brain. They could be poets, madmen, scientists or idiots and you never knew whether they had similarly unpredictable friends hidden away possibly with guns. In general the mutants just wanted to be left alone. So alone he left them.  
>His eyes lazily scanned the horizon, sampling various spectrums of energy. A waste of time really as the ion storm flooded the environment with high energy particles and almost all types of EM radiation. Still it was a conditioned reflex, he could no more stop being watchful than stop his heart from pumping. A sudden staccato flare of orange light and corresponding bursts of heat far to the north brought his scattered attention to a quick focus. That was abnormal. There were a dozen different things that could cause that sort of pattern but his mind quickly evaluated and discarded possibilities. Gas detonations. Lightning fires. Heat bursts. Jump Flares. Raiders.<p>

Hard brakes and a sluicing side slip brought him to a dramatic halt. Choices. Did he confirm or high tail it back? His eyes dialed up the magnification and the horizon leaped closer. Maximum sweep all fields, seeking another sign but finding nothing. Well if it was Raiders then they would have only jumped if they were forced to. Those psychotic bastards weren't as exactly stealthy, at least not by nod standards, but the Brotherhood was a bit unreasonable when it came to standards in that category. Still they had decent ECM, radar absorbent ceramic armor and they didn't go out of the way to advertise their presence. Plus they were fast. They weren't called raiders for nothing. Completely independent, operating in Blue, Yellow and Red Zones with equal ease they were true universal soldiers, mission success measured in body count.

_Fuck it._

Mischa kicked off and revved the engine. There was nothing to link him to the Brotherhood and unless they were as completely psychotic as Nod's endless propaganda about GDI Raiders accused them of being he could at least count on them not lighting up a civvie on a bike.

...

It was dark and quiet in his cell. His bed lay unslept in, coverlet emblazoned with the holy hand stretched taut over the thin hard mattress. His entire being thrummed. He had gone through his graduation with a breathless excitement. He had maintained decorum and accepted the honors and ceremony with grace and aplomb. But now here, finally alone he was cracking. Before him in the dim light lay the sword and the scroll. Both of them felt exactly as one would expect them to feel and he could divine no trickery to their forms. He was wracked with nervous anticipation. Which would contain the Blade of Kane? Was he worthy of the next step or was he going to stagnate. His fingers brushed each in turn.

Slowly he grasped the scroll by its hard casing, and started to unfurl it. His heart hammered in his chest as the creamy vellum and dark characters spread out before him. Out and out it rolled like the tongue of some strange magical creature. He was nearing the end. If the blade was here it would be at the center. Gripped by a sudden panicked urge to know he to griped the edge and flipped the scroll outward revealing every thing that it hid.

His breath caught.

Nothing.

Disappointment welled in his heart. He could feel tears in the corners of his eyes. He hadn't cried since his father had died, it wasn't that he hadn't wanted to its just that the tears never came. Even now as he faced the biggest disappointment of his short life he couldn't coax the salty droplets from the edges of his vision. They hung there stubbornly refusing to give him the release he needed.

Angrily he grabbed the scabbard and jerk the blade from its sheath.

Or at least he tried too.

The handle popped free like a cork revealing nothing at all. Confusion replaced all other emotions and he snorted back the nasal drip that had been accumulating. What the hell?

He held both empty vessels in his hands weighing them and trying to find the meaning. Now more than ever he was certain that there was another message, another meaning. Apparently his evaluation of the situation was flawed. His mind raced seeking possibilities and options. He sniffed again, his nose sensitive and inflamed with emotion twitched irritably.

What was going on? No Blade of Kane meant what? That he wasn't worthy of the Black Hand? That he wasn't worthy of The Program? That he was the Blade of Kane?

God he hated this symbolic bullshit. A hacking cough issued from his lungs. And what the hell was wrong with his throat? His fingers scratched at the skin of his neck almost without thought and then froze. Cold dread shot through his limbs his suddenly clumsy hand flopped out and grasped the scabbard.

Airtight!

Gas!

Mischa sprang to his feet, or at least attempted to. His legs failed and he sprawled awkwardly onto the floor. Paralysis crept through his limbs an his neck seemed no longer capable of holding the weight of his skull. There was a thump at the door as he nervelessly splayed out onto the cold stone floor of his room. Someone uninvolved with his poisoning? Or the perpetrator? Either case could be bad. Some of the initiates took opportunism very seriously. Quietly the door swung inward and a stream almost imperceptible footfalls followed by the clicking squeak of boots marked the entrance of a whole gaggle of uninvited guests.

"Bundle him up. I want this room cleaned and turned out for the new arrivals and I want him vanished by the first bell." There was a sound of silk on silk and then gentle hands grabbed him, rolling him onto a dark pool of fabric. Dread filled Mischa. A black bag! The Shadows wore masks and full operational gear and they wrapped the light bending disruption fabric around him with tender spider like motions. Everything about shadow teams was soft. Even their voices.

"Still conscious mistress."

"I know, its all part of the lesson." The Abbess's tattooed face loomed suddenly in front of Mischas eyes. "I will be seeing you again my son. But I won't tell you not to fear. Fear is wholly appropriate." With that she thumbed his eyelids closed and he felt a light kiss brush his forehead. "Brotherhood, Unity, Peace"


	2. Chapter 2: Fanes of Many Worship

**Second Cant: Fanes of Many Worship**

The wide emitter dish of a Bose Industries ssSD223 hovered an inch from Mischa's nose. The gun went by many names. 'Triple Ess', 'Screamer', 'Shriek Cannon', 'Banshee Blaster', 'Slush Puppy', but right now the name that kept running through his mind was 'Splatter Gun'.

He was working his sweat glands overtime and it showed. Rivers of what he hoped would be interpreted as nervous sweat poured down his face. It was one part biofeedback, one part subtle cybernetics and one part genuine fear. Well fear was the wrong word. Tension was more appropriate.

"L-l-l-loook guys, I didn't want no trouble when I climbed out of the bunker today. I didn't want to get caught in the storm and I certainly didn't want to f-f-f-fuck with you guyses day." The stutter was just on this side of plausible. Mischa was playing the scared civie to the hilt but the question was would the Raiders buy it?

They were and even dozen in number. If they were normal infantry it would have been a lance but according to GDI protocol you rated units not by size but lethality. Individual Zone Troopers and their Raider counterparts were considered a lance unto themselves, counted as a platoon per four man team and the three platoons he saw made this grouping a full company of Raiders. That was serious serious firepower roughly the equivalent of a couple hundred mud foots and full artillery and armor support. Whatever they were hunting it was something... noteworthy.

"Shut it." The voice was flat and reprocessed through the filters of the Raiders bubble helmet. The micro missiles nestled snug in the Y-racks protruding from the Zone Raiders shoulders _flexed. _The little missiles had pizo electric smart skin that allowed them to change trajectory mid flight and their tracking programs were apparently sizing him up as a target. _Shit_. Latest intel suggested that the raiders were using a cut back EVA system to help speed up the Raiders reaction speeds. The machine intelligence would monitor the emotional state of the raider through a host of biometrics and prepare the suit to act accordingly. If the missiles wanted to kill him then that meant the raider in the suit was suspicious.

"L-look man, I can get you stuff. I'm savvy check. More for you to spare me than to waste a perfectly good info source."

_God this is tedious shit_.

Mischa was hyped up but wasn't really all that worried. He was pretty certain could snake his way out of this with just words and if that didn't work... Well there were more surprises in him than one would expect. He certainly couldn't kill a dirty dozen of Zone Raiders, but he could probably ruin a couple days and make a clean getaway. Hell it wasn't like he had gotten ambushed by these chumps. He had all but rolled out the welcome wagon for them.

"One more word and we get to find out what color you are inside." It was the same monotone, betraying not even irritation.

The first flickers of true worry crossed Mischa's brain. Something wasn't quite right. The Raiders were so drained of all passion it was unnerving. He would expect it from the other Warrior-Monks of the Black Hand or those creepy Awakened Cyborgs but GDI wasn't big on upgrading its personal, they preferred to keep their humans safely human. D_eep Breath_. He forcefully banished the worry to the surface, letting it paint his features but not his heart. His eyes searched, find the details, find the solution.

The Raiders were veterans, that much was obvious from their movements. The entire company was spread well out covering all angles. Their sensor man, or woman, he couldn't tell from the body language, was methodically sweeping the horizon and none of them lingered out of cover. Their commander was conferring with the 2 other officers. The three of them weren't anywhere near each other, nor were they talking out loud, nor was there even any obvious signs of rank to designate who was in charge but Mischa could see how the attention of each Raider flowed, where it pooled and on who. It was like reading book. All you had to know was the language.

Their armor was well worn but also well maintained. That meant they had to have some sort of rig to back them up. Unless of course they were popping the suits off every night and doing a full check up and that was just out of the question. GDI Zone doctrine was real specific about exposure to the Red Zones and while they were outside of the zone itself they were well within the no-fresh-air zone of Sinister Seven.

Each raider had a decal of a crow with burning orange eyes stenciled on their left shoulder. He looked closer and saw that the bird had talons were of burnished steel and it was holding a dismembered eyeball in its beak. It wasn't a symbol he was familiar with but then again every military organization had informal names for its units. These raiders were obvious 'Crow This' or 'Raven That' or maybe it was 'The Something Crows' or some macho badass bullshit. Militants did the same shit all time but Black Hand Monks knew that such ego was worthless in combat and that morale came from faith not false icons. Still he would have been lying if the loving detail that the artist had put into the bloody optic nerve dangling from the eyeball didn't set some small part of him on edge.

Each of the Crow Raiders was busy with an assigned task, two to cover him, one of cover the ones covering him, three to lead and the rest to watch. Each Raider fit together like a puzzle piece and there was a skim of trust that floated through the whole setup that told him the unit probably had a decent survival rate in bad situations. That was reading kinda deep for surface impressions but it _felt _right and the the second rule of war was 'Know Thy Enemy'.

He needed all the information that he could pull from the vapor of nuance if he was was going to handle it properly.

Finally after precisely two minutes and thirty two seconds of deliberation with her captains the commander of this little raid stalked over to their prisoner.

Mischa was seated with his back up to a foundation wall of some destroyed pre-fall building so when the commander arrive she loomed. This one Mischa was certain was female. Most of the rest of the gorilla's were up in the air in terms of gender though he had few pinned down as guys. Not so the commander, he could almost smell the double X's. Everything about her screamed two things. Dangerous and female.

She was cradling a Zone Ops custom Scram-Rail, the pit bull of rail weapons. It was a close cousin to the Zone Ops Standard Rail but the ammo was larger so you got less shots. It had much lower power demands and delivered about the same punch. As a result could be used with the lighter faster more flexible Raider armor. It was a weapon of someone who had a great deal of confidence in their ability to place shots. Most of the of the Zone Ops weapons didn't required that much finesse. He counted four ssSD60 Sonic Grenade Launchers, an indiscriminate weapon if there ever was one, another two Scram Rails, four screamers one Shockwave Model-IX man portable Destructive EMP cannon and ..._well well well_... it seemed that they had a squishie gun. Looked like a certain Raider squad was looking to make a capture. Now all Mischa had to do was find out what.

"Your name please. Your purpose and your alignment." The Commander spoke. Same damn monotone as the troops. Must be they were all emulating this stone cold bitch. Only where in their voices he had heard disaffected almost studied lack of passion the commander's droning voice was a shell, a brittle sheet of ice that was covering something up. Holding something down. Mischa couldn't place what exactly, but it was not pleasant. Something horrific was lurking under the surface of this Raider with the eye eating crow on her shoulder.

"S-sam... S-sam Hark sir!" Inside Mischa smirked. Lets see how she reacts to that he thought. Then immediately doubt jumped in. Raiders were drop troopers. Which made them marines. Which made them naval. Naval custom has everyone addressed as sir or mister regardless of gender. Or had GDI standardized back to Army standard Sir/Ma'am. _Fuck this is pointless. _Mischa let the useless train of thought chase its tail and forged on. "I'm not Nod man I don't truck with that bullshit. I aren't GDI neither I ain't a side choosin' type of fella."

Now it was time to throw out some lines. See what nibbled.

"As you proly guessed I live in these parts and I keep a good watch out for any unfriendlies that come by. Nod raiders, GDI raiders (begging your pardons) and the odd mutant freak" Then in a hushed tone of fear and trepidation Mischa threw out the big lure. "I also sometimes see... other things... wrong things."

"Define your terms zoner."

"Wrong you mean?" Playing stupid was a great trick.

"Yes. please define wrong for me"

"Well you know... those alien whatnots that came swarming about that tower thingie that fell from space a couple of years back into the Sinister. The killer fucking bugs man." Mischas face was painted with a masters rendition of ignorant terror.

And there is was. A faint increase in tension that ran from the commander all the way down to the grunt holding the spatter gun.

They were Scrin hunting it seemed.

By Kane these GDI saps were easy. It wasn't really something to be proud of but a Black Hand Monk would talk politely with Mischa for an hour, be fooled by his artful lies and then put a bullet in between his ears both to be on the safe side and because hey unrepentant infidels don't count as people. The little voice in his head was smugly chuckling when all the sudden the world tilted sideways and spasmed.

Had he just been slapped? Stunned? What the hell? His vision swam as he struggled to get back on his feet. Vertigo crashed like a wave over his senses. _What the hell. _He couldn't be dizzy, that was one of the human weaknesses that he had left behind on Taja Yadav's bloody table. Vomit spewed from his mouth, his eyes wept and nose ran. A rough armored gauntlet fastened on the loose fabric of his undershirt and twisted it tight. The Cold Commander knelt in front of him silver blue faceplate reflecting his own twisted face back at him. His eyes struggled with the vision, the distorted image he was looking at was making him even more queasy.

"We have things to discuss now. Please restrain from unnecessary back talk or commentary. Answer my questions concisely and without exaggeration and I will withhold motivational pain"

"Wha-" A heavy gauntlet buffeted his head drawing a burning line across his forehead. Blood begain to well and seep.

"The Scrin. I want you to elaborate on your encounter with the Scrin."

Mischa shook his head to clear the confusion, sending droplets of blood flying. He had to take inventory before he spoke up. Things weren't going according to the script. First he needed to find the hidden weapon. He didn't know the enemy and if he was still fighting the sensation that the ground was having underneath him he didn't know himself all that well either.

_There.  
><em>  
>The muzzle speaker of a sonic weapon was built into the vambrace of the commander's armor. He knew the performance profiles of Disruptors like he knew the name of his mother and there was no way something that was by the looks of it 3 inches long with a wave aperture smaller than a pen could do any serious damage. It had to be some sort of close range crowd control device. Pretty clever actually. He guessed that the Raiders lost one too many troopers to angry mobs with sledgehammers and pick axes in some cramped urban hellhole. Either that or the Commander was a fucking sadist. A possibility that got a big vote in its favor a few seconds later.<p>

"It doesn't only work on the inner ear you know." Her fist and the disruptor riding it slowly descended his torso pausing briefly over his heart in a heavy handed but effective threat, before coming to rest on his guts. "If the intestines are subjected to prolonged exposure it causes causes necrosis and eventually rupture. Sepsis is an unpleasant and certainly slow way to die" _Great. _If this bitch didn't get what she wanted she was going to empty his bowels into his abdominal cavity. He wasn't really worried about that. If she pulled a shit-shaker-classic then his hyped up immune system and non-standard internal construction materials would easily prevent the sepsis that would inevitably result from fecal matter entering his blood stream. However if she decided to do a shit-shaker-excessive and her little gizmo manage to rupture some of those unique secondary circulatory systems he had down there... Well, then things could get really ugly really fast and dying screaming would be considered a positive outcome.

"Shit! Shit! I don't wanna die! Don't fucking kill me man what do you want to know!" Mischa let tears flow freely from his eyes. This was really melodramatic but you have to give the people what they want. Soldiers always expected their scare tactics to work, they dealt in a realm of lethality where everything was about the application of violence. He had seen it dozens of times on both sides of the coin. A bunch of GDI grunts trying to beat intelligence out of a captured militant or the sadistic shit that you got when some confessor barbecued a prisoner to 'extract' secrets. It was all ego masturbation. Torture got the subject to repeat words you shoved into his mouth. The real InOps guys down at Langley or the Priors of Tales were much much scarier. Sink your head into a fMRI and staple a SQUID to your forehead. Dope you up on some magic juice and then just talk. They talked for hours and hours and hours. Then they turned around and threw your ass in sen-dep and waited. Then the whole cycle started again regular as clockwork. The crack was almost inevitable. It was almost always a matter of when not if.

"If not dying is your goal, and specifically not being killed I would urge you to talk about the Scrin."

"Look I saw a bunch of the skittery ones, real tall and fast, a ways north of here running like hell from Red-7 about two and half days ago and there have been a few others since and before." There. It was a safe bet that the Raiders had been in the Sinister recently what with the rough Tiberium dust clustered around the filter ports of their armor. So whatever they were hunting came from the red zone. Two days should be enough that their target was still there, the half was for verisimilitude. The rest was hedging to keep the storylines open. Now depending on what questions they asked next he could spin the answers to pull revealing questions out of them. He giggled behind the mask. There was such a delicious irony to extracting information by being interrogated. Their queen bitch was having a fun time playing some cinematic grand-inquisitor and he got to reap the benefits.

"Is that two or is two and a half the correct value?" _Hmm_. A significant difference perhaps? He gambled.

"Well yeah it was more like two."

"What about more recent events or encounters? Anything out of the ordinary?" _Okay_ he thought, _so the zero event was 2 days ago_. Something must have eluded them or something else significant. They were out here so...

"Well last night I caught a glimpse of something but I wasn't sure what it was." Let them make up their own minds. Long pause and then the Commander reached around and flipped out an OperationTablet. The portable computer had a massive fold out context sensitive screen. She fiddled with it for a few seconds and then...

_Jackpot.  
><em>  
>"Is this what you saw?"<p>

Slowly rotating on an invisible axis was a Scrin. Not just a Scrin biomechanoid this was what the Hand and Eye thought a true Scrin looked like. He had heard stories and read most of the reports and top level analysis. He wasn't a true commando so he didn't have the clearance to read those reports, but he was most of a commando and those clearance levels were just formalities once they stuffed all the code matrices and slicing algorithms into your skull. Sure the inner circle dispatches were still out of reach but everything else he read just to remind himself that he could. The critter in the Raiders tablet didn't quite match the profile but that was why military intelligence is an oxymoron. Reality was never what your spymasters expected it to be. He allowed himself a tight nod.

"Yeah, thats the bugger I saw. It was quick, it was there and then I saw a flash of light and it was gone. It was midnight so the light was almost blinding, I guess there are a bunch of them though cause I saw another flash just like that first one off to the west." It was time to get rid of these tedious people. He had what he came for. Laughter threatened to break his mask.

_So these crows are hunting a Mastermind_.

It was a wonder they weren't dead. It was a wonder that they had chased the thing out of the Red Zone. It was a testament to their skill. He had to make sure not to underestimate them if they ever crossed paths again.

The Raiders were already moving. It appeared that the Commander had made a decision and let them know by comnet. It was a shame, life was so much easier for spies back when Commanders had to explain everything to their troops out loud. Still he did well enough despite the handicap.

Screw well enough. He was doing great.

By Kane this was what he was supposed to be doing. His blood was humming deep in the core of his body, stored energy waiting to be released. He still had to escape. That was the big challenge now, the big challenge of any mission. The getting out alive part.

He began to whine.

"So um? I helped you right, and I can keep an eye out for you, I know people in the area that could help you find that thing you are looking for. I just want to go home. Please."

Begging was of limited use, but begging and commenting on his continued usefulness was often quite effective. The commander however wasn't even paying attention to him. She was in conference again with her captains, while the rest of the troopers started to grab their gear and break down the makeshift camp that Mischa had 'stumbled' into. He saw them throwing glances over their shoulders at him, an exaggerated move that was almost cartoonish. They had to rotate their entire torso's to twist those thick helmets to get a look at him. One of the many reasons that Nod's practice of divination and cybernetic augmentation was a better choice than a meat sack in a tin can. Mischa didn't laugh though. Not even on the inside. They were deciding what to do with him and by the look of it there was at least one vote on the table to let the lobotomized ape who had him under guard splatter him. Or maybe they weren't in the mood to see all that gore and it would be one of those heavy duty pistols that he saw holstered on almost every hip. Those were the new GD-47's with variable muzzle velocity and ammo configuration.

A subsonic soft core would leave a very pretty corpse.

Mischa wasn't of the opinion that any more begging was going to change things. These people were pros and he had given them all the information that they needed to make a decision. Instead he started redirecting energy from storage to a metaphorical staging area. If these blind men had the eyes to see they would have noticed the subtle swell of his frame as blood rushed into every inhuman myofibril engorging the musculature in preparation for action. Instead they only saw his pale skin and sweaty terror. He really couldn't be too hard on them. He was after all a superior product.

Over in the huddle, and it was an actual huddle now instead of a metaphorical one there was an argument breaking out. Hands were gesturing and the decision was being debated in a rather lively manner. Mischa for his part was moving past readiness into a wartrance. He really didn't want this to degenerate into a escape and evade operation but he wanted to be moving before the order to kill him was given. Exploit a reaction gap. The trance was a risk as he was surrendering a portion of his conscious control to reflex and there was the chance that if someone twitched the wrong way he would jump the gun.

There was a pop and a grinding squeal from the trio of officers. One of them had cracked his helmet. His face was young, handsome in a pretty boy kinda way and a tight cap of shiny black curls sat tight on his skull. His tanned face was rosy with anger and veins throbbed in his temple. Mischa eased himself back out of the war trance. This was interesting. An ethical quandary. A second raider soon followed suit. This one was a middle aged man with salt and pepper hair and deep set eyes that crackled with intense energy. The young man was obviously arguing to spare him and the older man was arguing to put him in the ground. However this, unlike his unit, was not a democracy and there was only one opinion that he needed to concern himself with. Their commander was the last to crack her helmet but it was her face that caught caused air to hiss from his lungs. The Abbess wouldn't have been pleased.

Glassy dead eyes set in a chalky white face. There was no hair whatsoever on her pale skull. Neither eyebrows nor even a military approved peach fuzz. Poets could praise fair maidens and their creamy ivory skin to the end of the universe but anyone who set their eyes on this face would find their flowery words crumbling into dust and ash. Most of the skin on the left side of her face was cloned graft, it was subtle but he could see the ridge of scar tissue standing out like a caterpillar tracks in a leaf. The line ran from her cheek up through her eye, which glimmered with the glassiness of cybernetics, all the way around the skull to the ear. Pink cigarette sized Keloid fire scars dotted her throat so he could only assume that someone had burned her face off. In dark satire of the corpse skin on the right was a massive full color tattoo of crow. It stood on one foot beak poised to tear out out her flesh and blood right eye. A Majors rank bars, golden and polished sat in her right ear. All theses things were striking, those corpse eyes especially but it was the barcode that took Mischa's breath. It was a crude ident strip burned into the hollow of her throat. Nod POW designator, Mischa couldn't get a read on it from this angle but he recognized it from nightmares that he had long ago buried deep under layers of conditioning.

_He was _f_ifteen again listening to the brothers and sisters cheering as the smell of cooking meat filled the stony courtyard of LaCrueset Prison. The begging had stopped a long time ago even in those with the voice left to beg. He clutched his gun as if it could protect him from the sounds and dialed up the volume on his headset. Bouncy pop rhythms covered up the sizzling sound but couldn't stop the scent._

_Years later when he first smelled cooking pork he had vomited. He wanted to leave, to run away into the barracks and hide but he knew that Julian was there raping some GDI footslogger who hadn't thought through the consequences of infantry deployment. It wasn't what his brother was doing that disturbed him. Well. It did, but it was be the fact that Tiffany there as well that really got to him. She had been reading a book. A fucking book. She had smiled at him when he walked in and asked if he wanted a dip his wick after Julian was done. "I wouldn't fuck that GDI slut with a dog dick" she had said laughing "but then again, I am not a dog" a broad amused gesture indicating towards Julian who was obliviously pumping away, hand wrapped around the slim throat of the young soldier, her bar code visible between his fingers, " so I shouldn't tell them what to do with their dicks."  
><em>  
>Mischa shook his head, banishing the memory. Taja had promised that the perfect mind wouldn't be troubled by what she called trivialities. She said he wouldn't feel guilt anymore. She hadn't lied but she hadn't told the whole truth. He was mostly free of the nightmares but the memories were still there. Still potent. It was the damn bar code that was troubling him. It wasn't like what she had promised! He was Mischa of the Hand he shouldn't have to remember Mischa Summers.<p>

"I would ask politely for quiet."

It was a cold command issued from a thousand miles away. The Major's unfiltered voice was somehow even more disturbing than the sanitized mechanical speech that issued from the Zone Armor. Mischa was certain now that this woman wasn't nearly as gone to the world as she projected. It was a brittle shield that stood on the precarious edge of fracture. She strode quickly to him raising a hand for silence. Her Scram-Rail went into the hands of a underling. Both hands fastened on Mischa's shoulder and she lifted him to standing. She leaned in staring into his eyes. Her dead orbs boring into his own. His biosystems and operations training were working overtime to conceal and misdirect but he felt impotent to hide his true self from the burned woman. Back into her he stared past the cold shell and into a world of rage and fire that was bottled up within the pale cage.

Real sweat dappled his hairline and he felt fear. The servo assisted grip on his arms tightened from crushing to bone warping and the Major's upper lip peeled back in a wolfish snarl.

Then with alacrity that was startling even to Mischa's enhanced reflexes the Major flung him to the ground and spun on her heels. Her helmet snapped shut just like the jaws of a trap and she waved off her Raiders.

One by one they shouldered their burdens and trotted out of the defile. The trio of raiders that had him in their charge were the last to leave. Carefully the backed into covering positions and the thug with the screamer stowed it in favor of a hard sealed case. The container levered open revealing a host of medical supplies and an iconic logo. _Kane above. _All this time it was the damn corpsman that was champing at the bit to splatter him on the rocks.

"Stay still kid and you'll live." The medic brought a loaded quick flip injector to Mischa's neck. A milky white substance sloshed in the chamber. Propofol and midazolam unless he missed his mark. So they were going to knock him out and dump his short term memory. Or rather they thought they were. A wise compromise he supposed between the hardnose bullet-twixt-the-eyes camp and the rainbow-happiness-faith-in-all-men factions. The medic wiped the injection site with alcohol then betadine in studious adherence to sanitary protocols and then with a swift sure motions homed the injector and dumped the payload into his jugular vein. Mischa counted to ten then began to droop his eyelids and let slackness permeate his form. Meticulously he mimicked the stages of the chemical's typical progression in the majority of all laboratory subjects. When he finally lay slack jawed and boneless eyes half open pupils blown and drooling the medic slipped his armored glove, reached out, checked his pulse then patted him once on the head, rose and moved to join his companions.

...

Boerne was silent as a tomb when Mischa skulked in on the evening of the fifth day. After his little run in with the raiders he could have called his mission a success and legged it back to his unit but he was feeling to jazzed up after his little intelligence coup and didn't want the sensation spoiled by a hissing lecture from Duncan or Ezekiel's endless icy disapproval. So Mischa completed his scout pattern and then lazily returned to town. Stashed the bike in the same garage he found it in and snuck into town. By now he figured Duncan would have his team strung out in the ruined surface dwellings and the whole place would be wired with booby traps and other improvised defenses. It would be amusing to see how easy it would be to sneak up on them.

Instead what he found was emptiness. A raw recruit would have gotten an eerie feeling from this setup and a veteran would be checking his guns and calling for close air support. Slowly he stole around, checking for traces checking for anything. He found nothing, not even the disturbances his militants would have made as they canvased the town. Duncan had been adamant about that and they lacked the will to defy him. Whatever happened happened as soon as he left on his sojourn if not sooner.

Three times he covered every inch of the town. He moved swiftly and surely but it was well past midnight by the time he was done. There was nothing up here. Only the warning rumble of an incoming ion storm. The dune buggies they rode in on were still parked in all the same garages, their supplies untouched. Dust had collected on the door handles and there was no sign of any tampering on any of the more esoteric scanners that he had access to. It was sad but he was pretty certain that only bad things could have befallen all these men and women he called comrade.

He decided to forgo his armor. It would only slow him down and if he found that he really needed it there was not much in the world that could stop him from getting there if he decided to really run. He did however snatch up the Firefly-19C Pulsed Laser Carbine that was sitting on top of his clunky Black Hand Plate. Like most but not all hand held lasers it was technically classified as squad support and far to heavy to be comfortably carried without servo assistance, a world class weight lifters strength or of course extensive cybernetics_._

It was cold, silent and blacker than pitch as he slide down the spiraling tunnel that lead to the mole town.

His nerves were on razors edge the muzzle of the heavy rifle flickered to and fro tracking the restless course of his eyes. He couldn't shake the worry that he was going to find something horrific here. The best he could hope was that the locals had decided to swap allegiances and kidnapped his men. In his heart of hearts he knew that was a forlorn hope. Nothing human or claiming even nominal humanity would leave spoils like the buggies lying unclaimed. Fatal gas? A pack of Tiberium fiends? A vein hole? Hell if he wasn't feeling free air flow in the tunnel he would have said a cave in was a safe bet. All these scenarios were with the realm of possibility and all of them meant no survivors. But it wasn't these things that lead him to steal in like a thief, weapon in hand.

_Oh no._

His nostrils flared and drew a deep breath of the air rising up to meet him. He smelled unwashed humanity, waste and dry slithering particles heavy with the buzzing energy of aerosolized tiberium. He hadn't had the nose to smell it or the brain to interpret it when he last was exposed to this smell, still in a preconscious manner he immediately recognized it.

It was the stench of the Scrin.

_Fuck_

All that Mischa could think of was the damned scrin those Raiders were hunting. Could it be that they had chased it out of the red zone and it hid here? This place was supposed to have more than a thousand people. The creature code named Mastermind by GDI InOps were capable of taking the human mind and cracking it like an egg. They established a link with conscious mind that was poorly understood at best and caused a trance state in which the victim would merrily shove their hands into a blender. Subjects that survived the experience reported a floating out of body sensation and a giddy unending joy. Some said that they could hear whispers in their ears telling them to do things and that they had no inclination to disobey. Others said that the urges to act in one manner or another came from deep within. No matter which way you sliced it it was mind control. Which in Mischa's opinion was some science fiction bullshit.

Lasers, particle beams, energy shields all these things were well grounded in physics. Even the invaders wormholes and temporal stasis abilities were plausible if you did some research but the mind control? It just didn't make biological sense unless there was a metaphysical component to the brain. Chemical control of the biochemically based brain made sense. Attacking by sense or electrical induction, all these things were in the realm of possibility. It scared Mischa on a almost theological level that the Scrin could remotely manipulate the mind.

_Deep breaths._

Mischa calmed himself. Masterminds were limited by numbers. Only a handful of thinking brains could be dominated at any given time, and they had to expend a finite seeming pool of mental resources on the task. Resources that couldn't be reclaimed until the control was relinquished. There was also anecdotal tales that the control could be resisted. Some GDI special operations personnel had made reports that found their way into the hands of Nod that indicated that some individuals with strong training or senses of self could resist the compulsions at least vestigially. Mischa hoped that it was true.  
>Down he went. He estimated that he was nearly 100 meters below the surface when the light from the mole town began to color the tunnel. Thermals began to ramp up and he dialed back his light intensification. The town was situated in a hollow grotto about the size of a tiny sporting arena. Girders of steel, polymer and concrete crisscrossed the low roof and from them hung a thousand dim lights that filled the cave with a soft evening light. A hodgepoge shanty town dominated the vast cave and all along the edge he could see branching tunnels that would probably lead to other similar grottos. Sitting parked in the center of their mole down was the digger responsible for it all. A ancient and highly modified Subterranean APC a Badger mark 8 originally unless he missed his guess.<p>

Between the vacant houses he prowled waiting for the imminent threat to manifest. He was so hyped up so ready for it to happen that when it actually did he was done moving by the time he became aware he had reacted. Out of the corner of his eye he saw a dimly outlined bulbous shape collapse in one of the secondary tunnels near 50 meters away. The pop-hiss of his discharging laser rifle echoed through the chamber followed by the rapid whine-hum of its recharge cycle.

_Light magnification up, zoom, thermal overlay, UV spectrum._

The image of the fallen foe reeled in like a fish on a line. It was so high res he could taste its sizzling blue blood. The four awkwardly small legs matched up with the Mastermind threat profile but the body was too squat, to thickly armored and there were no manipulator extremities. GDI call sign on this type was Shock Trooper, an adequate functional description but lacking in poetry. He preferred to call them by the Nod moniker of _Ifrit_, a demon of fire.

There was a staccato flash of purple light as the rest of the Ifrit jumped through where or what ever place teleported objects passed through and scattered themselves in the ample cover of the village. Mischa was already moving. His hands and heart knew where his targets were. The Firefly spoke, masonry exploded somewhere off to his left and he felt a shrill scream. The three or so layers of bricks and light aluminum siding that the IR lance had punched through had ablated the killing power of the beam enough that the Ifrits armor saved its immediate life. Firefly cradled close to his chest his running like the wind. He needed to get out of here. He could possibly kill them all, cat and mouse. He was obviously the superior marksman and faster on the draw. Still he didn't have the initiative anymore. He bunched his legs below him spiked the power output in his thighs and calves and leaped. His head almost scraped the ceiling but his trajectory was perfectly calculated. Carrying him over the shallow coverless bowl of the central cavern to the shanties on the other side. A bit of tactical repositioning to the side that had the exit.

It was at the height of his arc that he felt the thing touch his mind. His neck whirled to bring it into his sight and he had just an instant to glimpse its slender flower like shape and three glowing eyes before a inexorable force bent around his mind.

_It was strange to be hurt once the screams were wrung out of you. It wasn't that you didn't feel the hurt, it just didn't touch your physical form anymore. He had been awake and in agony for roughly 3 weeks now. It shouldn't have been biologically possible but the drugs these days were amazing things. Part of the pain came from the things that were slowly devouring his form consuming the weak human flesh and leaving in their wake a new body. The rest he was certain was induced. _

_It wasn't just machines. There were others. People he supposed. They wielded scalpels and saws. They wrenched and tore at him. Carving and plucking, even as they gently nestled new and alien things within him. The ones that stirred sticky fingers in his body remained faceless behind blood spattered surgical masks. Only the Abbess remained bare faced to the world. _

_She would sit by his bed, as it were, speaking to him in his agonies. Talking softly about glories and follies. Her voice was probably what kept him sane. It had taken him 10 days to gain enough control to speak in short grunting sentences. 'Why' he begged. 'Why'._

"_For just this reason my son. So you can master pain. So no hurt can have any power over you. So you can earn this gift. Without a steep price your magnificent new body is a meaningless trinket. Now hush and save your strength. Soon you will not even need to expend effort on letting the pain pass through your form." She reached out and ran a finger over his exposed heart tracing meaningless designs in the pericardial fluid. "This will fade. No mind can hold the true majestic horror of the transformation. Still a fragment of this divine experience will stay with you. When you stand up from this table by the power of your own limbs and join my other sons and daughters in the Hall of Awakening you will feel such kinship that it will make you weep. Each of your brothers and sisters now lay in their own bloody birthing bed's screaming and crying to Kane, to God, to Allah, to Shiva , Vishnu and Yaweh. Begging any god that will listen to spare them from their torment. You beg only me and for that I love you most my son. You are such a practical boy, but still a boy. I am indeed your mother but in the throes of labor I am as helpless as you. You must draw that first breath all by yourself."_

_She leaned in and kissed him fully and deeply. It was tender and lustful. Mother and Lover both. _

"_Remember that we call this Divination my son. God dwells within you now."_


	3. Chapter 3: They Would Disdain

**Third Cant: ** **They Would Disdain**

Running on a broken leg wasn't advisable. But it was still possible if you didn't waste time.

In the moments after a fracture the muscles surrounding the bone seize up into a state of high tension. A rigid and immobile spasm that won't relax without a good deal of time or perhaps a nice swedish massage. The reasoning was (at least by the reckoning of learned men who devoted time to such things) that while running, or walking for that matter, on a broken leg was ultimately a bad thing for the chances of the leg healing normally, there was a good chance that whatever situations that had lead to you break the leg in the first place might be unresolved. Or in simpler terms, if you break a leg while being chased, a little long term damage to the leg was preferable to passing through the gullet of a mountain lion.

The pain was blinding but he ignored it with unnatural ease.

Mischa didn't enjoy being in pain, given a robust set of options he would have chosen 'pain free' without a seconds hesitation. Still just because there was no masochism in him didn't mean he really cared all that much about it. The pain was a sensation, like the color yellow. You didn't get distracted because someone went and dumped a bunch of lemons on the floor. Of course the problem was that even though the color of the lemons wouldn't bother a person you could definitely still slip on them. By the same token Mischa could run while in agony but the physical fracture of the leg reduced his capacity greatly.

He could feel the bone grinding every time his leg came down. It was a displaced crack in the head of his tibia, near the ankle. His entire calf had frozen in a rigid splint, hard as iron what with the crap he had buried in the musculature. He limped with an awkward list, his foot locked in a immobile L-shape. As a result both his top speed and leaping prowess were deeply impaired.

Heavy skittering sounds marked the movements of the Scrin that hunted him while a more familiar patter of bare feet betrayed a more sinister menace. The soft light of the caverns smudged the details of reality from Mischa's eyes. That and the surging tide of combat hormones he was riding high on. His brain was not functioning in the normal range of human consciousness, his body and its training was very concerned with his immediate survival, mechanically reacting and responding to the immediate environment. Above that surfing on the choppy waters of the animal survival instincts the analytical and intuitive aspects of his mind were working on possible solutions to the dilemma. High above all the chaos like thin clouds floated the the part of Mischa that he liked to think of as himself. Unconnected to the desperate reality he was caught in a tizzy of anxiety, disgust and ugly memories.

The feeling of something invading his mind was a gagging taste that he just couldn't spit out. When he had begun his leap he had been filled with a smooth confidence. He didn't enjoy combat, but he enjoyed the perfection that he brought to the act. There was a master craftsman's pride in the creation of a piece of art in motion. That had all ended the minute he felt the _thing _touch him. It slithered in through the crevices between thought. Brash and forceful. There was a cruel certainty to the rough manner in which it seized him. It knew on its most fundamental level that it could not be resisted. A feeling that was beyond pride and well into the pale lands of faith There was no subtlety to its assault and it had no conception that it could fail. It was strange, to put it mildly in those in those first shocking moments. It entered him, wormed its tendrils into the crevices of thought. Placed rough stranglers fingers around the throat of his will and thrust itself unwelcome into the soft tissues of his mind. A weird elation sprung from nothing and a sublime bliss had washed away doubt and reason. All he needed to do was relax and go follow the urging voice that spoke without words deep in his heart. Everything else was unimportant.

The subversion of his mind had lasted all of a second and a half before the deeper demons of Taja's bloody birthing, of his torments and trials, had surfaced from the murky depths and torn the invading tendrils to shreds. There were moments in his life that he truly loved Taja but they were few and far between. Most of the time he was filled with what could only be described as ambivalent adoration. In that moment when all the cruelties she had inflicted to make him strong had risen up and screamed no in the face of the creature that had taken his will he had loved her without reservation. The creature was shocked as well it seemed. There was surprise in the fragment of its psyche that was within him. Surprise so complete that it violated Mischa's innermost being and broke his normally flawless kinesthetic sense. He had hadn't landed so much as crashed. His nerveless leg struck the ground and physics once again proved to be a merciless mistress. It didn't matter if you built a body of meat and bone or ceramic and carbon fiber, land the wrong way on a joint and it will snap under its own weight.

And so it came to pass that love and wonder mixed with a sensation of violation and disgust were banished from Mischa's mind as his leg fractured in three places. The ankle was of course first, foot soldier of the leg, it snapped when the sheer forces of titanic leap came bearing down on it. The shin came next, splintering like an over flexed cord of wood. The final insult to his skeletal structure came when all the other fractures caused him to simply trip. His knee came down hard and that tiny floating piece of bone colloquially known as the knee cap cracked in two nice pieces. The pain was startling but the ingrained desire to survive that had initially banished all the useless emotion from Mischa's head. There were still more ifrit and his ears could discern a veritable horde of people surging upwards from one of the tunnels that ringed the central grotto. There was no reason to believe that they were anything other than mindwarped thralls to this alien creature so he reacted with appropriate cowardice.

Half running and half slithering Mischa wormed though the tiny crevices between the motley huts and let the Firefly hang loose from its carry strap. He had considered shedding the extra 20 kilo's of weight that the gun represented but the gain in speed just didn't offset the abandonment of such a potent weapon. Without the laser rifle he would have to rely on the shredder pistol he kept in a concealed shoulder holster. The shredder was a delightful little toy but it had no penetrating power and he was woefully uncertain that it could put down the heavily armored shock troopers in any reasonable time frame. What's more a squad support energy weapon fully capable of burning through steel and stone could possibly create an exit where none existed and that alone was worth lugging the now cumbersome device.

The good news was that even with the handicap of his only partially functional left leg he was still much faster than any normal man. Hardened GDI special ops troopers would have been astonished to be outpaced and not even marginally be the limping cripple. He was moving at near as 30 kph over uneven ground. Using his arms to brachiate between low hanging outcrops like a chimpanzee while his good leg threw out explosive bursts of acceleration every time it touched the ground. Mere seconds elapsed and he was already almost to the exist.

Bursting free of the shelter of the tangled hovels he prepared for the most hazardous moment of his flight. The transition between the cover of the huts and the cover of the tunnel. In any firefight cover was the ultimate resource. If you were in cover even an expert or master marksman would have to rely on luck to get a good hit. Out of cover the reverse was true. A poorly trained grunt with a decent automatic weapon would eventually put a slug in you. The distance between the two safe points was less than 50 meters and even with the broken leg Mischa could cross the distance in less than a handful of seconds.

Against normal poorly trained foes this would have been a short enough time that it would slip into the gap between recognition and reaction. Mischa wasn't really certain what sort of training the Ifrit were given or even if they were trained at all. For all he knew they were grow in a vat somewhere and programmed like a automatic toaster. Programmed or trained they were good. They had excellent reactions and were crack shots with their massive anti-vehicle weapons.

Just one of those plasma disc's that they threw around in massive salvo's would tear through him like he didn't exist. Those disc's could rupture tank armor and rip light vehicles to pieces and even his post human physiology wasn't anywhere near up to the task of absorbing that kind of fire. Some of the front line combat cyborgs could possibly take a glancing blow and he had hear rumors of some next generation armor plating that could do even more. The problem was that in the five or so seconds that he needed to cross the kill zone each of the Ifrit could loose not one or two but whole volley's of these projectiles. They could literally saturate the area with firepower and even a clean miss could badly wound him.

Despite the plasma weapon not containing the shrapnel that most explosive devices used to achieve a kill it was still very dangerous to someone who wasn't wearing armor for the simple fact that when the disc's popped all the superheated magnetically sealed gas rushed outward doing it's level best to get away from itself. Neither GDI nor Nod had ever found a way to make effective plasma weapons because of this. The high energy plasma was magnetically charged and repelled other plasma. That meant that without a sealant the packets of energy dissipated at an incredibly short distance. Somehow the scrin had created a magnetic bottle to contain the plasma using no physical technology. It was against the laws of physics as most scientists understood them. A device formed from nothing but energy without any material component contained the plasma discs until they reached their target. However once they impacted the containment failed and the discs exploded outward. The heavier liquid matter burned into whatever it hit but the lighter gaseous plasma raced out in every direction. For this reason a clean miss could still saturate its target in burning gas.

Having his skin burned off wasn't really high on Mischa's list of favorite activities and aside from the pain the risk of infection and fluid loss wasn't to be minimized. Mischa was modified enough that even in the case of massive full thickness burns to most of his body he could be counted on to survive. It wouldn't be easy or pleasant but it would be possible. The real danger came if he were to get a face full of the discharging plasma disc's. Nothing could save him if the superheated gas reached his throat or lungs. The burns on the inside would scorch his ability to breath from him and set off a chain reaction of swelling and infection that would eventually claim his life.

It was strange that in one respect he was so different from a normal man and in the other just the same. It came down to function. No matter how changed he became the fundamental design was immutable. The skin was there to protect the body and so its function as a protector of the rest of the body could be freely enhanced. The lungs however were not a barrier at all, they were a membrane designed to let something in. And no matter what changes were made that made them better and more efficient than their normal counterparts this fundamental function as something that is designed to absorb rather than defend couldn't be contradicted. So while Mischa's skin and muscle and bone were more than capable of taking the plasma burns in stride his lungs and throat were ultimately unable to absorb any more damage than a normal man.

The dangerous gap grew larger in Mischa's mind. He could just run for it and there was a chance that he could make it without any damage. He didn't even know if his foe knew where he was or if the Ifrit where set up to fire onto the kill zone. In thought this lay the difference between the merely good and the great. Had he been merely a good solider he would have been willing to make the assumption that his rapid movement and deft shooting had suppressed the enemies movement and that he was free to make this relatively low risk dash. However because he was not merely good the possibility that he was running into a kill zone was too much to risk. As Sun Tzu said the great warrior secures himself against the possibility of defeat. It wasn't enough for Mischa to be reasonably sure he could get away with the risk. He had to tilt the odds against being caught in the crossing.

For almost all manner of infantry operating in an enclosed environment like a building or cave grenades provide an invaluable tool. They bounce around corners, they explode in a variety of manners and colors and they are generally held in high respect for their ability to flushing an opponent out of his cover. As a result when Mischa chose to leave behind his cumbersome black hand armor he declined to leave the bandoleer of grenades that was strung across the cuiraiss. The grenades themselves were simple things and yet artful in their own way. They didn't have the power or grace of the GDI discus grenades nor did they have any of the exotic and sometimes horrific payloads that had become common. The secret to their brilliance lay not in their use but in their creation. Using nothing but common household chemicals, modified appliances and a few crucial bits of Nod tech any militant could manufacture these little death dealers in the comfort of his own home or as the case may be someone else's home. Sure they were a bit lacking on the power side but they were almost entirely made of various plastics (harder to detect on medical x-rays!) and thus in addition to constituting a classic war crime were very light.

It would have only required a fraction of his strength to hurl one of the featherweight explosives but Mischa wasn't just lofting one. He was hurling the entire 20 grenade string, and his target wasn't close, it was all the way back at the center of the village. Electronic arming was considered in the early stages of the grenades design but was ultimately discarded as needlessly complex and a simple pull and twist interface much like an egg timer was decided upon. If this was a string of GDI grenades then Mischa could have just told the grenades to go off in sequence and they would have obliged. Since these were on the cheap grenades he had to settle for pulling the pins out as fast as he could. The grenades had a default five second timer, which meant from the first pin he had five seconds to pull 19 more pins and hurl the entire belt all the way to the central support structure of the grotto. A nerve wracking sequence especially given the notoriously temperamental and often lamented erratic nature of the detonation timers. Luckily four at a time meant only five strokes to de-pin all twenty and the entire belt sailed easily into a y-junction of support beams with more than 3 seconds to spare on their first grenades.

The explosion was a tremendous thunderclap that kicked dust and stone outward, warping metal and sending shrapnel spattering off tin roofing and the odd bits of misappropriated siding. The grenades weren't blasting charges, they were anti-personnel weapons but still 20 of the suckers going off in sequence was enough to at least create the impression that damage had been done. Which was the entire point. As the first of the staccato blasts was going off Mischa was already underway, sprinting with his odd limping gait for the exit tunnel. It was a shame to use every single grenade in what was essentially a grand distraction, he had no illusions that he could collapse an entire cavern with one well placed ka-boom. That being said the very fact that the grenades weren't going to behave in such a dramatic manner was the point. The sheer number of them combined with their staggered detonation times would lead to chaos. Even as he head the primary explosion fade the secondary blasts echoed around the caver. Grenades unexploded by the concussive blasts of their fellows bouncing through the village bursting in random locations. The real reason behind his choice of the central support pillar was simply that it was far away. It minimized the chance that one of those grenades would come back to hit him.

In the back of his mind Mischa wondered whether or not he hit any of the villagers or if it was even necessary to spend his stock of grenades on what might prove to be a pointless distraction. He wasn't even sure that the Ifrit were watching this exit. As shadows of the tunnel entrance embraced him he wondered passingly about the fate of his squad. It didn't quite pain him that he was running out on them, the sensation that he felt was more akin to irritation or a vague disgruntlement. All things considered he would have preferred to have rescued them. He had forged on into a uncertain battle against a horde of scrin hadn't he? In his mind he dithered about the strength of his conviction but deep down he knew that it was just an act. He was pretending to have moral qualms about leaving his companions, his subordinates, to die. The truth was that while he cared there wasn't any strength to the feeling. He was no more connected to them than a man was to a long anticipated meal or a prized electronic gizmo. It was disappointing and painful to lose them but he couldn't imagine truly risking his life for them, or shedding a tear for their passing.

As the tiny shreds of loss played in the shallow waters of his mind more pressing thoughts swam in the depths. What was he to do upon his escape? These scrin were not a small threat, especially not if they were lead by a true scrin and a mastermind at that. A response was needed. A very dim part of him that could only be called patriotic objected to letting inhuman monsters loose upon the innocents of the world. There was also a much stronger stream of thought that wondered if there wasn't a way to worm his way back into grace with the capture of a scrin mastermind. That was certainly a vain hope. If Taja with all her power and connections hadn't been able to keep him in the game then bringing a single scrin wouldn't have much clout to it. The inner circle already controlled the threshold tower and all its knowledge. Compared to that the value of a single enemy paled. Whats more it all assumed that he could somehow capture the thing unharmed and prevent it from killing itself or destroying its psychic abilties. To GDI who didn't have the advantage of the Tacitus or the threshold tower the Mastermind was a great prize but they had the firepower and a plan to capture the thing and had brought all appropriate resources. The raiders...

A faint smile drifted from the depths of Mischa's mind to his lips. The Raiders were a wonderfully elegant solution to his problems. Assuming that they weren't already way out of range he could rope them into cleaning out the village. The smile stilled and died as his mind cast back to the cold eyed Major. For the most part the GDI forces claimed that they held a higher moral standard than their foes. They refused to use certain weapons on the ground that they were unethical and they claimed that they didn't torture or execute prisoners. Normally Mischa would have been willing to trust in the desire of his GDI foemen to act the part of Knight's in Shining Armor. Just like their propaganda always painted them. However, all of those happy self delusional wishes went right out the window as he remembered the Major's soulless gaze and the raging inferno of malevolent spite that churned behind it. He could count on them to get the job done. Oh of that he was sure. They would kill every last scrin and walk away with their prize in tact. Whether or not there were going to be survivors, his brethren and the villagers alike, that was the real question.

Mischa's hobbling run ate up distance and the tunnel began to curve into the loops of its final upward spiral. It was pitch black and he could hear footsteps, human and alien behind him. Also there was some breathing coming from farther up the passage. Human by the sound of it, probably three or four by his reckoning. That was disturbing. Not because he expected three or four thralls to the mastermind to slow him down but because of the implications. On his way down he had observed no other branches in the tunnel so the presence of these people meant that either there was a hidden entrance that he had totally missed (which was terribly embarrassing), or that the aliens had waited until they had blocking forces in place before they revealed themselves in the grotto. That not only indicated that they had advanced tracking and detection that discovered him before he was aware of being discovered but their leader was no idiot and had not underestimated the lone human despite the overwhelming apparent advantage that he, she or it had. He wanted to take the more comfortable of the two explanations. It would be simpler to assume that he had just missed some hidden side tunnel but the same instinct that had lead him to expend his grenades on a maybe wouldn't accept the easier to the two choices.

He had to assume that the thing that was hunting for him, that had touched his mind, was not only intelligent but cautious and prudent. Mischa chuckled, a real throaty chuckle. Of course this thing was cautious and prudent, anyone that had survived being hunted by those Raiders for any period of time was bound to be both canny and cagey. If this creature had probably had all its contempt for humanity burned out of it by the cold eyed bitch and her squad of ruthless thrill killers. Well that last bit was unfair. He had no evidence that they were in it for the jollies. In fact considering that he was not only still alive but there had been people in the Raider Wolfpack that had fought for his life it was certainly completely out of line.

It was hard to completely leave behind the contempt and hatred that a life time of fighting against GDI had given him. All the friends ripped apart by heavy caliber machine guns or blow apart by mines and indiscriminate air strikes.

Taja would be very disappointed in him. She had always told him that hatred was a very petty emotion. She held what she called petty emotions in the greatest contempt. Petty emotions where expressions of deeper more truthful emotions that had lost their way. They served no practical use or they had once been useful and had lost their way. Hatred she said came from mistrust and fear. Both of those emotions were useful, to mistrust someone who had proven untrustworthy was wise, to fear someone that had proven dangerous was wise. But hatred? Hatred was an unnecessary outgrowth of a primitive paleolithic tribal environment that allowed you only to dehumanize rivals. Something that discipline could easily accomplish. Hatred lead to contempt and contempt lead to underestimating the foe. Taja had deep respect for GDI and a deep desire to see them purged from the world in cleansing fire. There was no hatred or contempt for the great enemy in her heart, only an unflinching will to break the shackles of the past that chained humanity in its current imperfect form. There was no one in the world that Mischa respected more or trusted more than Taja Yadav but still he couldn't ever bring himself to emulate the level of control and conviction that his Mistress oozed from her very pores.

_Mind on the task at hand_. Mischa slowed his gait to a crawl, allowing his wounded leg some respite. He let himself melt into the wall and flowed forward. He could hear the rhythmic explosive breaths of his targets barely a quarter turn above him in the slowly spiraling tunnel. He was counting on them not being able to detect his movements. Mischa wasn't completely happy with that assumption considering the damage to his leg, but he was reasonably sure that the variance in possible profiles among his targets was within acceptable limits.

There was the rub.

If he was right then this would go reasonably well. He could sneak past the crowd of thralls and then hoof it to his bike then... Mischa didn't have a very good end game plan. He had the overarching survive mantra bounding through his skull at a furious tempo but he didn't have the sort of elegant solution that Taja would have loved.

The tunnel leading to the mole town wasn't a regular thing. It was barely two steps above a natural cave and with a few more stalagmites and some guano it could have passed. The irregular width and poor lighting meant that Mischa could have under ideal circumstances slipped past the twenty or thirty thralls that packed the tunnel. He would have skittered and slunk like a hybrid of roach and spider. Clung to the ceiling. Advanced by inches. Sped through the holes in perception. With his shattered leg that wasn't nearly as likely.

He could hear every single breath being drawn in the tunnel and the pattern and force told him that he wasn't going to be slipping by. He had been hoping that the process of mental dominion would render the controlled humans into incompetent shambling zombies. The sort that showed up in all those ridiculous turn of the century movies. The breathing told another story. There was no unity to their inhalations. One set of lungs would tell a story of panic while the one next to it would exude cool headed control. It seemed that while the mastermind had the power to puppeteer it's control could also leave enough freedom for the thralls to think. To fear.

It was just as his shredder was clearing its holster that an idea occurred to him. Mischa didn't pause, letting too much thinking go by in combat was fatal. The gun tracked with liquid grace and the uncomprehending features of a zoner disappeared in a coughing hail of ceramic splinters. The weapon he had been clutching fell from nerveless fingers following a mist of blood and the body that had once held it to the floor. Mischa recognized the weapon. A heavy caliber assault rifle of slightly outdated Nod design, the irritating know it all in his deep brain identified it as a NDK-37. Made sense. The brotherhood was balls deep in this little mole town. Zeke an his crew had probably dropped the schema and a minifactuary with the locals a while back.

The thought was simple. Well. It wasn't simple, but it was predicated on a simple basic premise. Mischa needed help. That was it. He needed to find someone who could fix this Scrin problem he was having. The shredder woofed. Mischa always thought that it sounded like a puppy barking. The soft little barks they made on the way up to the full throated yipping. A pair of thralls pitched back as the hail of flechettes perforated organs vital to continued life. He loped and skulked up the tunnel dispatching foes as they came to him.

Human reaction times just weren't up to snuff in this cramped brutal sort of fire fight. Generally speaking a human needed half a second to start a coherent response. Actual reaction time was around a fifth of a second, but in all but the best trained soldiers that reaction was a useless twitch. Half a second was a much more useful benchmark for cogent action. A fully wired Black Hand Monk could squeeze off probably three carefully picked shots in that half second interval. Mischa was as to that Black Hand Monk as the Monk was to a regular human. He advanced with both care and urgency. The fire of his broken leg was a constant irritating companion. A whining child tugging at his heels. Hobbling him when he wanted to run.

It was near on full dark in the tunnel, some bioluminescent fungus providing pitiful illumination. The Scrin might have forgotten that it's human slaves needed light to see or perhaps the generators for the tunnel lights had been damaged at some point. Some of the thralls had lights taped to the barrels of their weapons, but a wiser few lurked in the shadows or down the dozens of blind dead end cul de sacs that branched off from the main tunnel. For a certain value of wise.

They didn't know how to still their breath. They couldn't help but have their hearts hammering in their chests. Out on the badlands not even Mischa could have picked the sound of a single human heart thumping in the darkness. But here in the comforting and silent womb of the earth it was as if he had his ears to the very breast of his foes. There was an intimacy to tracking by heart beat. It almost hurt Mischa when he killed men whose heart he knew. Men and women as there was a certain general tendency of one to gravitate towards the other. Killing women didn't bother him more than killing men. They were all the same breed of human and that was the issue. Despite the literal oceans of blood that had stained his hands Mischa had never been all that comfortable killing humans.

It was strange that this was running through his mind as he slaughtered the armed but essentially helpless slaves of the scrin abomination. Perhaps it was what sort of help he was planning on getting. Perhaps it was the fact that he had decided to get help at all. Mischa wasn't really sure when this had become his goal. He held the thoughts in the palm of his hand. Inspecting them as he ascended the tunnel. Perhaps he had always been aiming to find and save his companions. Why else had he kept up his descent in the face of an obvious Scrin presence. Why else was he contemplating an insane and risky plan to recover this settlement.

A flicker of motion and terrified battle cry heralded yet another sacrifice at the alter of Mischa's shredder. His gun hand, currently the left, moved on its own accord. His eyes flickered over the features of his foe, drinking in the soft epicanthal folds, the canted cheeks and full lips of- _Oh Shit._

The musculature of his arm spasmed and the weapon fell from his suddenly numb fingers. His breath had abandoned him. It was Xia who sometimes like to be called Sarah. Xia who he had sat with at a campfire not five days ago. Who had once sang a lilting Malay folk song about a love carried beyond the pale by demons. Who had shed three tears after she had finished and sometimes lost herself between words and stared off at the horizon. Until this moment in the dark bowels of the earth when his treacherous mind paralyzed the hand that would have done her harm, he hadn't understood his feelings. Shallow companionship, amusement, contempt and mild irritation. These were the emotions he had felt for the men and women under his command.

Light strobed and the ripping thump of Xia's assualt rifle filled the narrow corridor. There were three thralls crowding behind her. Each clutching weapons of varying efficacy. Each aiming with varying degree's of incompetence. To her credit Xia actuall had the muzzle of her weapon pointed at where Mischa had been, which ironically made her less of a threat than her utterly incompetent companions. The tiny cataloging part of Mischa's mind noted that the dominion effect didn't seem to unduly affect the skills of the thrall in any negative manner. Xia's reaction and accuracy profiles still roughly matched up to what he had observed in their long boring deployment together.

Even as bullets started chewing holes in the stone Mischa was past his former and perhaps even current compatriot. He flung himself into a lopsided roll that not only carried him forward and out of their firing arcs but let his extended leg scythe into the closest thrall. Mischa weighed roughly two and a half times as much as a man of his frame should and the fully locked up muscles of his broken leg had the rough consistency of spun steel. Normally hitting someone with your broken leg was really stupid. It was just the sort of thing that ended badly for a man.

Mischa was not really a man anymore.

There was a snapping crunch and the zoner thrall dropped like a poleaxed horse. The heavy and iron hard limb had clipped his skull and then proceeded to crush his collar bone. Concussed and out of the equation. In his head Mischa heard Taja Yadav scolding him. 'That doesn't even deserve to be called a kick. You just hit her with your leg. Treating your body like it is a slab of meat. Your form is holy. Please try to treat it as such.'

"Fuck you abbess" Mischa muttered under his breath as he quick as one two drove his fingertips into the chests of one then the second of his remaining targets. "Double fuck" he hissed as he realized that he had no sooner than an eye-blink fallen back into patterns she had ingrained within him. Bare handed he had enough cross sectional density in his fingertips and momentum in his arm to penetrate flesh, but not flesh laminated with denim, leather and whatever the hell else these zoners had layered onto themselves. The zones tended towards being very very cold, with of course random wild swings into broiling heat, an extra little fuck you from tiberium. That meant that when Mischa's fingertips punched into the chest's of the two zoner thralls they failed to actually pierce the skin.

As it happened this was the sort of distinction useful only to the coroner. The force of the strikes shattered ribs and sternum, popped lungs like paper bags and concussed their hearts. One was a middle aged woman, the other a younger man. Both of them fell to their knees, slamming heads into the tunnel walls before spasming and croaking out feeble breaths. For now the inability to draw breath would keep them out of Mischa's way. Later the traumatic insult to the heart would prove fatal as their own blood strangled the thumping organ. Well... that was going to kill the young man. The older woman was already going limp. It seemed that he had shocked the woman's heart into fibrillation.

There it was.

Three human being down. Dead, dying and concussed in as many heartbeats. Only Xia was left. Soft. he had to be soft. She was spinning on her heels, her weapon tracking and her posture sinking into a sharp shooters crouch. He could see hands twisting and a wicked composite bayonet snickered out of its under slung holster. Steel impact forged into a lattice of tiberoid microtubules. One hundred and ten percent guaranteed to shear through any ballistic armor manufactured by GDI and packing a necro toxic scorpion venom in the hollow core. Good stance, excellent instinct, better than average reaction time and most importantly she was at home with covering her options. She still wanted to shoot him, but in case that didn't work out she was already ready to stab him. Mischa was impressed. Xia had always struck him as no more than competent. It seemed he had done her a disservice.

A hand spring two rapid limping steps and a five point disarming sequence stripped the weapon from her hands and slammed her roughly into the wall. Mischa adjusted his grip slightly and strangled her. It wasn't a particularly malicious strangle, rather well mannered actually. He doubted that she would even need more than a dab of makeup to cover his fingerprints. Not that a soldier on deployment would ever worry about that sort of bullshit but it was an apt metaphor for the minuscule damage.

It was a quick stoop to retrieve the shredder and a quick jaunt to the top of the tunnel. Between the broken leg and the dead weight of Xia and her full kit slung fireman style over his shoulder it was as fair a contest as any could have asked for. Nervousness dogged Mischa as he climbed the midnight spiral. The tunnel was too cramped to admit most of the scrin morphologies. Most being the operative word. If he found himself face to face with the swirling cloud of metal shards GDI unimaginatively called Buzzers then things would get very hairy. Once again Mischa found himself gravitating to the Nod designation. Djinn was just so much sexier. Assuming that sexyness was what you were looking for in a hostile designator. Not to mention that most militants bastardized it into DJ, Jin-Jin, Gin and Tonic, Gin and Terror, Jinni, Jenny, Psycho Jenny, and his personal favorite, Dreamy Jeannie.

Still he was lying to himself. It wasn't a _Djinn _ that had him worried. He had options if one of those storming blenders came writhing up the tunnel. For one they were many things, but quiet wasn't one of them. He would have a good deal of time to plan, improvise. The Djinni were deadly, fast and just plain unsporting; but they could and would be put down with simple bullets. It was the fear of another compatriots face appearing out of the darkness that he feared. Not just the possibility that he might kill a friend. _A friend? _ He whispered the word and tasted the bittersweet nuance. No, he cared, and he didn't want to kill a friend but it was the spastic betrayal of his limbs that he was truly terrified of. The thought that he could lose control of himself inspired a fear deeper than anything that he could remember.

It was like being betrayed by your mother. For longer than he could remember Mischa had been in control of himself. Even when he was spitting blood and teeth in a Mexico City alley his body obeyed what he had willed. When he was clinging to the narrow maintenance gantries outside of Karen Thorton's office high rise he had been sure of his place in the world. Not in the celestial sense of enlightenment or revelation, but in the much more terrestrial knowledge. A certain understanding of his own self. His body knowledge was much of what made him such a good fighter.

When he had been pinioned on Taja Yadav's bloody birthing bed the pain had been terrible, but it had been the loss of his sense of self that had nearly undone him. The numbness of the nerves that carried his mind into his body. Still, even then it was chemical and physical restraint that had robbed him of his vital motions. Here and now it had been his own will twisted back on itself that had stolen that bedrock certainty.

It scared Mischa. It scared him beyond words.


	4. Chapter 4:  Hypocrisy and Custom

**Fourth Cant: Hypocrisy and Custom**

It wasn't a good plan.

It wasn't even a mediocre plan.

It was a bad plan.

So far as Mischa could tell not only was it reliant on him getting phenomenally lucky multiple times it also made some pretty unrealistic assumptions about the nature of his foes. What was worse was that he had decided to go through with it anyway. His rational mind knew that he was making up a comforting fable. A fairy tale solution to his problems were everyone got to live happily ever after.

The only positive thing that Mischa could say about his little plot was that so far phase one was an enormous success. A success that was tempered by the fact that phase one consisted entirely of hiding in the ruined basement of a build-a-bear workshop near on fifty years dead, tucked in the blasted remains of a strip mall that had been in its living years a bleak and joyless place.

While he had been underground another ion storm had spalled out of sinister seven. It merged with the already brewing category II and suddenly there was a century worthy category IV storm blasting Boerne. Assuming of course that you had the century right. There was nothing like this that had ever happened on the old earth. At least as far as Mischa knew.

Thing was, they had a fun little nickname for the Category IV's out in Italy and central europe where they were more common. A quaint little colloquialism.

They called them Tempesta Rovina. A ruin storm.

The sort of storm to which adjectives like; flaying, grinding or cutting, could be easily attributed. The sort of storm that even at his peak, unencumbered by the burdens of injury and companionship he would have been at best uncertain of surviving. Getting as far from the mole town as he had was, in his mind, a laudable accomplishment.

There had of course, been a price to pay for even the moderate success that he had achieved. So now, he was hiding out, licking his wounds and waiting for the storm to spend it's fury.

...

When he had first emerged from the mole tunnel into the mostly intact ruin that sheltered it he had been moving at a pathetic hobble. Xia was not a heavy woman but she was still eighty kilo's of weight extra weight without her gear, and with her packs and all the sundry weapons and ammo she had strung about her person she was an easy hundred and twenty. Throw in his firefly and the lead heavy charge packs and he was hauling more than a hundred and fifty kilos of dead weight on a shattered leg. Even for the most superhuman of supermen, that was a tall order. Things had gotten even worse when he had stuck a testing hand out into then screaming dust winds. It took only seconds for the sand burn to start its not so slow accumulation.

A class IV ion storm, in addition to unleashing terajoules and terajoules of lightning in all manner of interesting and lethal forms also whipped up winds that could surpass two hundred kilometers per hour. The soil in the remnants of the American heartland wasn't normally dry enough to get a good sirrocco going, but the combination of tiberium leeching all the vitality from the land and the immense static discharge of the storm meant that even damp soil or shale rock could find itself blown into the sky. Driven by the fury of the gale it could quite literally rip flesh from bone.

The easy choice would have been to slip into his Black Hand Carapace. The armor, like GDI Zone Armor was specifically designed to survive and endure up to Category V storms. According to it's manufacturer. For a while at least. Most didn't care to test these things.

The easy choice would have been to abandon Xia and come back later or to bundle her up in layer after layer of blankets and hope that he could make the mad dash before she was cut to ribbons. Of course, that assumed he had blankets, or for that matter anything that could be used to ablate the storm, which he didn't. It also assumed that he was willing to risk anything happening to her. Which, in a strange slow way, he was realizing that he wasn't.

There was actually something elating in the idea of sacrifice. It wasn't a feeling that he was familar with. Mischa Summers had always been a cynic, a non believer. He lied and said that he placed his faith in those around him, but in truth that wasn't faith. It was sure knowledge and a cold rational calculation. The idea that the life of this woman, this comrade of his, was worth preserving, even at a terrible cost, filled him with an alien and wonderful sense of purpose.

Xia hadn't actually been a bad fit for the Carapace. Both Mischa and his squadmate were roughly the same size. He was a bit slimmer but the suit had a flexible inner layer that conformed to the wearer so that didn't end up mattering. Even the boob issue hadn't been much of a problem. Xia wasn't exactly a busty wonder. Truth be told most Zoners were rather poorly endowed. Zone runners in particular usually had three major strikes against cup size. Early life starvation, malnutrition during puberty and all the strenuous physical activity that a military life entailed meant that a flat chest was the most common chest. Big knockers were as the saying went, GDI knockers.

It had been a hectic and nerve wracking fifteen minutes as he had furiously undressed the unconscious woman and stuffed her awkwardly into the heavy black coffin. A more detached Mischa might have gotten a little lecherous thrill out of stripping the actually-quite-pretty Xia, but the fear that some scrin horror or another one of his mind controlled comrades might stumble upon his not so hidden hideaway. He was less than twenty meters from the tunnel entry and thanks to the storm he couldn't hear anything. He had nearly lost his cool a couple times when some bit of of her raiment had proven to be an exceptionally difficult challenge.

Putting her into his suit had actually been alot easier. He had put the damn thing on so many times that it hadn't been all that hard to his adapt his technique to another. Still he had made sure that Xia was well sedated before he slapped her into his armor. The last thing he needed was to have her wake up and still be under the alien's mind control, while in his power armor. Talk about a headache and quarter. Luckily Xia had doubled as the squads medic and had an over stuffed medicine chest, including no small amount of recreational concoctions, more than half of them already used.

That had actually been a bit of a suprise. Mischa had been well aware that a number of his squad had this habit or another. A little bit of recreational anesthsia was, in his mind, a perfectly acceptable response to life. What had been shocking to him was how well she had concealed it. Thinking back he now he could see the little clues, but it was a tribute to her contrtol that she had never made it obvious.

For himself he had splinted his wounded leg as best he could with a section of corrodded pipe and five pairs of socks stolen from Xia's pack and then thrown her goggles and respirator. He did his level best to fit everything that she had been wearing onto him but it didn't always work out, and when it did it made him look like some sort of comical fat man. Still he had needed as much insulation as possible to survive the storm.

Once he was ready he had given himself some combat stimulants and had slung the unconsious woman over his shoulder and thrown himelf into the elements.

It had been, oddly, not so bad. At least at first. While his clothing and armor were in tact. The first fifteen minutes had been unpleasent to be certain. He had been battered around by the winds and even through the haze of the pain killing battle stims his leg was afire. He kept having to shift his weight onto it to keep from being knocked over. That had been as they say, not good.

The first bit of gear to die had been his gloves. There really hadn't been any drama too it, just a sudden mild prickling sensation that slowly got worse and worse until he could feel spotty patches of his skin coming off. The backs of his gloves had been sanded into cheese by the storm's power. Other bits had followed. His collar, the fabric above his knees, ankles, wrists and elbows. A little patch over his stomach where a hitherthen unknown weakness of the fabric was made known. There wasn't much bleeding. The subdermal reinforcements that he had gotten were, below the dermis (obviously) but above his muscles and they protected all the larger blood vessels from being ruptured or cut. At least for a time. The scales were strong and flexible, enough to turn a knife maybe. Provided that it wasn't too sharp and the man weilding it not too strong. Bullets, even small ones would find it no real obstacle. But it was certainly sufficient to ward off the sands. At least for a while.

The real problem was with his eyes.

Xia's goggles had been made of a hard transparent metal. Some sort of tiberoid alloy Misca supposed. The metallurgy of it was well beyond him but the manufacturer had felt confident enough in their engineering to put a boasting little tag on the head band that declared that it had been "built zone tough". As it had turned out, it wasn't. After only a few minutes small scratches had started appearing, by the end of the first half an hour it was difficult to see through the thicket of little abrasions. Mischa had cursed a steady stream of foulness at the universe in general but the manufacturers at Fjörd Outdooring in particular. Never trust a blue zone sporting company to produce red zone equipment.

It had been the goggles more than anything that had forced him in doors. The pain and the damage were both survivable. It wouldn't be fun playing skinless Mischa for the next few months but it beat the hell out of being incinerated by plasma. The same couldn't be said for eyeless Mischa. Those weren't going to be growing back, and he was roughly a million billion klicks from the nearest nod cyborging facility. And that was assuming he was off the official black hand shit list and could actually requisition a decent pair.

When the lenses started to go opaque he had a choice. Expose his prescious baby grays to a windstorm filled with knives. Try to navigate blind. Or, find shelter.

He had chosen shelter.

Sure he could see on a whole bunch of fun spectrums but unlike some cheap plastic goggles the metal was completely opaque to just about everything he cared to check. Not that it would have mattered. Thermals, UV, radio and microwave spectra were all equally useless in the storm.

Mischa had a map of the area leftover from his little recon job and even if he couldn't get a good pirate GPS fix on his location he had had a good enough idea of where he was that he had been able to choose a likely location and get there without too much effort.

Three solid kicks had caved in the storm cellar's corroded doors and a few more had given him access to a small stockroom that was home to slightly less dust and decay than the rest of the basement. He had found a couple hundred vacuum sealed teddy bears eviscerated of their fluffy innards in another stockroom down the hall. With a carpet of the fuzzy bastards and the soft incandecent light of the variable intensity heating lantern giving a homey glow it was almost pleasent.

Which brought him to the here and now. And his big gamble.

Xia lay breathing softly on the veritable sea of grinning button nosed bears. He had stripped her from his carapace for a variety of reasons, some noble some practial and some quite self serving. She was quite the sight in her skivvies. All lean muscle and hard contours. Scarred too, enough to be attractive to any who liked women with a history to tell. And tell they certainly did. There were whipping scars on her back. Good and deep ones too. Not a bull whip that did that work. A penal whip or he was a slack jawed drooler.

You could always tell.

The perfection of them was a dead give away. You could confuse them with a sword wound if you didn't have the eyes. Wide and straight as an architects level with just the faintest hint of widening as they crossed the long muscles of the back. They gleamed almost yellow in the lamp light. She had caning scars on the soles of her feet and what seemed to be cigarette burns dotting her arms and breasts. They were careful to avoid her face it seemed. Someone had wanted her pretty, and taken care to keep her that way.

Xia hadn't taken the same care.

Sharpnel stippled her neck, wallked its way up the side of her face right about at the line of her temple. A bomb makers scar by the looks of it. The semi pro's tended to work with a welders mask and armored gloves but proper EOD equipment and its flanged neck shield were rare and hard to come by. She had probably realized something was going wrong a milliseconds before her little package went up. Turned her head away from the blast and caught it just behind the welders armor. It couldn't have been anything larger than a grenade but still it seemed that Kane had smiled on her that day.

He knew where the next scars would be. Xia had come over from the Oceania after the Ayers base fiasco. Taking her age, origin and the nature of her scars Mischa was pretty certain that she had served time in an Indonesian gulag. Most likely the private little hell of some tiny scumbag despot.

No one walked out of those things unchanged and most of the times the scars on the outside were the good ones.

Visions of Crueset flickered behind his eyes.

His only real question was did she land in prison because she made bombs or did her prison time give her a reason to make bombs?

Mischa blew out a heavy sigh. There wasn't much point in putting it off. He had no real choice in the mater. He needed her awake if they were going to make any decent escape. He reached out and grabbed onto the sedative patch taped to the hollow of her chin and tore it free.

Would she be free of the creature's control when she woke up? Did it have a maximum range? Did being unconscious break that link? What about sedation? If it still was in control would it be able to see from her eyes? Could it locate her? What about the ion storm? Would that interfere?

He knew so little and yet he was gambling so much on what? A whim? A neccessity? Faith?

It took a long long time. An eternity that lasted twenty two minutes seven seconds and three hundred and thirty nine milliseconds.

With the first vague stirrings of life every fiber of his being twitched. When she first awkwardly raised a hand to bat at some unseen irritant he nearly leapt. When finally her eyes groggily pulled themselves open it was pure relief that instead of some long protracted rigamarole she immediately let loose a startled yell and scrambled backwards.

Xia tried to pull herself into some self defense stance or another but her awkward limbs got tangled in themselves and she went down with a whumpf in the pile-o-bears. Two more times she made attempts to get on her feet and both times she was met with tranquilizer induced failure. Finally she simply gave up and levered herself into a sitting position and spent a few moments appraising the situation.

"You look like shit Mischa." Was her appraisal.

That brought a smile and a flood of relief.

"Yeah, well I think I am doing pretty well considering."

"Considering what?"

"I had to wade through two ifrit, an even dozen worth of thralls and a 4 klick trek through a class IV ion storm with a broken ankle with your inert corpse slung over my shoulder."

"You've been busy I see. Did you also skin Redmond Boyle's nut sack and down a juggernaut with nothing but a blasting charge and a one liner? Or is that on tomorrow's agenda." Her face was as serious as a fortified bunker but her voice couldn't help but let mockery slip in the door.

"Depends on whether we are alive tomorrow." He smiled. "I already have one GDI director carved onto my bedpost, why not go for a second."

Xia chuckled. Or at least got halfway through a chuckle. Somewhere along the way it broke down and became a stuttering hack. A sawing sound that was half mad laughter and half wretched bawling. It lasted all of ten seconds before she asserted mastery over her self and brought the wild emotion under control. She spoke softly.

"You aren't by any happenstance going to tell me that everything that happened over the last three days was a dream? That maybe we had some bad mushrooms in the mole town and this is just a really nasty trip?"

Mischa slowly shook his head 'no'.

"Thought not." Xia ran a hand through her hair pushing it from her face. "I assume that me being down to my underoos and you being missing a shit ton of skin means that you crammed me into your carapace armor and took a run through the storm in light armor." Mischa nodded in quick assent. "I suppose that means that you owe me roughly two hundred big ones for all my shit you trashed and I owe you a heck of a lot more." He nodded once again. She collapsed backwards and sighed theatrically.

"You good?" Mischa tried to make the question casual.

Xia threw up her hands in a noncomittal motion.

"Not really. But I suppose I'll live. I always do." She tilted her head and gave Mischa an appraising look. "It's too bad really."

"What is?"

"That you don't have tits."

That brought a full throated laugh from Mischa.

"A fact that I have myself often regretted. Would have made some boring stretches alot more tolerable." Xia guffawed briefly and then continued talking in a far more somber tone her eyes misting with memory.

"That was a pretty daring rescue. Storybook even. Dashing Knight of Kane rescues fair maiden from the bonds of an evil sorceror. I married the last girl who rescued me like that. "

...

Time passed and the storm continued to rage. They shared MRE's. And swapped tales.

"Did you really kill a director?" Xia asked.

"Assistant Secretary of Agriculture actually, but because of the power of the agriculture department it is a directorate level position. Karen Thorton had a bit of a weakness when it came to her bed mates. Liked them a little on the young side. Not too young, but anyone with hair on his chin was immediately disqualified. I might not look like much now but I was a pretty boy when I was fourteen. Believe it or not the brotherhood has a pretty big presence in the blue zones. Sure we have our intel apparatus but I would wager that we do more vice for profit than spying."

"Her pimp was a brother?"

"Sister actually, but yeah. The director had a habit of importing pretty young zone boys and kept them around the house. She would dote on them, dress them up in nice clothes and occassional sleep with them. Compared to alot of the places I have been it wasn't all that bad. Took a couple of weeks to figure out a plan and then once I had my escape mapped I slit her throat and made my gettaway." Mischa stroked his shoulder. "Got my skorpios the same night. Put me on the watch list for the temple."

Xia grimaced.

"You didn't cut her throat during the act did you?"

"Jeez no! That would have been all kinds of creepy. I jimmied the door to her room while she was sleeping and used a steak knife I had aquired from her kitchen."

Xia laughed.

"How about those scars on your neck?" In response she absently traced the line of knotted tissue with a finger.

"Got a bit careless with a kneecapper clusterbomblet." She smiled fondly.

"I was perhaps a little less than sober and smoking to boot. Not the smartest combination I know but the explosive was supposed highly stable; electrical and HvEx detonation only. The smokes and the H6 were all part of a big collection of swag we picked up from this GDI firebase we knocked over. My figuring was that nothing was going to say 'fuck you, you tan facist scumbags' like bunch of ADM kneecappers.

"We were not a big outfit, hundred and thirty all and all. A few tankers, some bikers a couple venom jocks, a shadow team and a fully crewed spectre artillery platform. Not even an MCV, so we didn't have full minufacture capablities. Instead our fabworks was some rinky dink joke of a emissary that our engineers had been keeping in a quantum state between life and death for the better part of five years. It could handle the metallurgy but explosives were difficult and the actuall assembly work was way too much for it.

"So there I am. Filling up those little bomblets with this grainy explosive sand. I do a hundred then have a cig. Do another hundred and have a cig. I put cig out while I am working keep my blast shield down, eyes on the prize and all. All that good shit they teach you in the training camps. What I forgot was that these were GDI cigarettes. There was an gimmicky capacitance based igniter built into the pack. Perfectly safe if you don't have granulated explosives all over your work bench. I tapped the thing the wrong way and it started a charge sequence. I got maybe a quarter seconds warning and then.." She clapped her hands together. " BAM! Powder goes up. Hits my cook pan and I have pyrex shards from the measuring cup embedded in my head."

Mischa whistled his admiration.

"Lucky."

"Tell me about it. Leslie gave me nothing but shit about it for the better part of a year. Always was a bit of a drama queen. The way you heard her go on and on about it you would think that we sold carpet for a living rather than soldiering."

"Leslie was your wife?"

"Yeah, cute as a button she was. A real sweetheart too." Mischa raised a questioning eyebrow and Xia responded with an exasperated shake of her head. "Of course she had her flaws! She could be a real harpy at times and she never ever seemed to get what a turn off deployment crotch was. She was immune to coochie stank and acted like the rest of the world walked hand in hand with her. Gave me the whole wounded 'you won't do this for me' act too."

Mischa made gagging sounds.

"I was once tortured for three days by amateur dentists," he said, "I was vivisected and resected without anesthesia, and you have managed to successfully give me chills. Congratulations, you are a rare woman."

Xia made a sort of mocking half bow. "Man I wish I had a smoke," she complained, "or a drink. I can feel heavy conversation looming and I would hate to have to face that without some inebrieation at my back."

Mischa made a half smile. "I know I want to ask about the whipping scars. Or maybe your wife. What's your big one going to be, torture? Murder? Vivisection?" a lump formed in his throat, "How I got here?"

"Fuck it." Xia made a half hearted reach for her bag and then sagged, "How about I tell you about Leslie and how I met her, which covers pretty much all the good shit and you tell me about and you tell me a story of murder, vivisection and shame."

There was a memory of a smile that painted Mischa's face and he didn't speak for several long moment. There was a warm something glowing in the long untended coals of his soul. It had been so long since he had opened up to anyone. There was the small sweet pain of a muscle long unused being stretched and kneaded for the first time in years.

"So," he said. "where would you like me to start? Or do you want to cast the first stone?"

Xia looked him over for a few moments. Weighing her options.

"How about we go one for one?" she said.

"Sounds like a fair cop." he responded.

"I suppose that I would like to start with how you still alive and talking to me. You are missing a few square feet of skin, your leg is broken and what fuzzy memories that I do have of my time under the Scrin's control tell me that your took me down along with three others in four heartbeats with nothing more than your bare hands. I know that Black Hand Monks are often enchanced but that goes beyond the pale." Mischa grimaced and responded with a slow heavy voice.

"I might only be ranked as a Friar in the Hand but before I flushed my career down the toilet I was on the cusp of graduating from the Commando Program. I don't have the honors or the rank to accompany the office, but I am essentially complete. I am, as they say, 100% post consumer human." Seeing her puzzlement he continued.

"All of the Brotherhood's Commandos since the second war have been cyborgs of one type or another. Back in the early days the technology was crude enough that if you weren't a tiberium mutant it would flat out kill you. The human body just isn't made to withstand the type of trauma that sort of surgical alteration entails. What's more, even if you had the consititution to survive the inital damage your average human doesn't heal fast enough to truely integrate the new components. Not to mention, his own immune system will cough up a whole host of problems. Inflammations around the implants, anaphylaxis from the machine byproducts. You name it and it probably killed some poor schmuck.

"Thing was that all of those gross physiological problems paled in comparison to the issues of the mind. Human beings tend to like themselves the way they are and the early works were gruesome and painful. The few human successes that did come of the ReGenesis program were mad as hatters. The new limbs and such had to be wired directly into the brain. Otherwise what is the point, right? You might just as well put a man in power armor and give him a gun. Hell you could even do the sort of neural linkup we use for our Avatar walkers." Xia for some reason screwed her pretty features into a grimace when he mentioned Avatars but she didn't say anything so he continued. _What's was that about. _He thought.

"Thing was that you average joe would take years to achieve a level of control that we would expect from a toddler, which when you think about it makes perfect sense. Takes about five to seven years for a human to really figure out two legged locomotion and that is without having to unlearn all the habits of having organic limbs. The human mind just wasn't adaptive enough. Sometimes if the new limb was a very close match for the old one you could get the brain to simply alter the existing knowledge to fit new circumstances, but that was a problem in and of itself. The early tech was brutal and crude. Trying to make it look and feel human was yet another design hurdle in an already fraught process.

"Tiberium mutants were perfect. Not only did they have the enhanced constitution and rapid regeneration needed to handle the surgical remodelng, their physiology was already vastly warped. Which made making the mental adjustments another new body easier. Their immune systems were either inert or well at home with foreign intrusions and finally, there are also changes in the brain itself. The tendancy of the forgotten towards madness is a external manifestation of a vastly expanded abilty to repattern and repurpose nerves."

Misha rolled back the loose sleeve of his stolen shirt exposing a broad track of skinned tissue. It was moist with seeping plasma and had the color and consistency of raw steak. Which it essentially was. It looked mostly human but occasionally, where the damage was deep a layer of matte black scales could be seen, lurking beneath the visage of normalcy.

"As you can see, advances have been made." He rotated the arm slowly. "CABAL changed everything. Divination was a more central tenant of the faith back then. Thing is, people on the whole like who they are. They don't like change, especially not when that change involves grafting hunks of metal to your body. Though the path of enlightenment had it's adherents, and even its devout; it was always Kane himself who kept the Brotherhood from straying back into safer more reactionary policies. When he died, for the second time, and the Brotherhood was forced to endure the firestorm crisis without his leadership, backsliding was inevitable.

"Images of a legion of cybernetic monsters forcfully converting men, women and children into half human abominations were the hallmark of CABAL's little war. It irrevocably tarred the image of the entire concept of cyborging, and without the express sanction, blessing and protection of the Messiah that proved to be the final end of the reGenesis Program."

"But obviously not the end of the research." Xia interjected.

"No, obviously not. It just forced the program under ground, split it into a dozen independant programs, each with their own master and own purpose. It was simply too useful a path of technological development not to explore. Many of the key scientists merely returned to their original disciplines and continued their work has been under a new guise. Cybernetics requires electronics, biology, computer science, medicine, tiberian studies, psychology, weapons engineering and even advance particle physics to work. So the lessons and techniques of the program seeped into every crevasse of the Nod research infrastructure.

"The commando program was one of the main splinter groups of ReGenesis. It was already a deep dark secret and it is and was genereally expected that the vast majority of all candidates would fail the various secret rites and trials. Failure of course meaning death. This gave the program a steady stream of recruits ready and willing to die and no one would ask questions when they failed to returned. As long as the end result looked passably human, they could do anything they pleased."

Mischa opened his mouth and showed a pink human tongue. He unbuttoned his shirt and displayed his pale but unremarkable torso.

"New skin was one of the final stages of the process. Slightly different in composition, slightly tougher. But as you can see it certainly looks the part.

"Thing was I needed upgraded bones and new muscle so they skinned me completely to gain easier access and then flensed the old muscle out. The scarring where they stitched my new skin on is so fine that it doesn't even register to most. And furthermore one of the ancilliary augmentations speeds my healing, allows me to regenerate with greater fidelity than your average citizen. But underneath this, there is not much that is recognizably human. They tore out my heart and lungs, subjected them to heavy tiberium infusion before stitching them back. My liver is perforated with mechanoid tumors and crystalline growth and my kidneys are wrapped in what looks like tin foil and studded with tiberium nodules. They kind of look like little baked potatoes actually."

"How do you know what your kidney's look like?" She asked.

"One of the many trials and tribulations of the Program is a forced state of consciousness during the entire surgery. I got a running commentary as they pulled each piece of me from my body and then replaced it."

Xia made a hissing sound and made a warding sign, fist clenched and index fingee curled. The holy scorpion tail to dispel evil and bestow blessings.

"You were awake when they skinned you alive? When they cut your flesh from your bone? How is it even possible?"

"Simple," Mischa gave her a malicious grin, "They didn't sedate me."

"No shit!" she exclaimed. "I am asking you how you lived."

"Drugs mostly. And it wasn't all at once. The operations took weeks. Months maybe. The preparation took years, though I didn't realize it at the time. An infusion here, a bunch of pills there. A physical exam that ended with a shot in the arm. All little divinations. All part of building a candidate that could survive the process."

As soon as those words left his mouth a lightning flash of horror struck behind Xia's dark eyes. Her pupils went very wide and her gaze jumped from his skinned flesh to her own scarred arms.

"Yes," he said, voice gentle, "one and the same. The process still only works on tiberium mutants..."

She held up a hand for silence and he paused.

"Give me a moment!" she said. She then closed her eyes and knotted her brow in concentration. Her mouth moved silently and he watched as she pieced it all together. It took her less than two minutes. She let out a little laugh and gave a rueful shake of her head. "We're all mutants aren't we?", her voice was tinged with pure wonder.

"It's not a simple yes or no. It's a sliding scale."

"When does it begin?" she asked. "The infusions at the shrine of secrets? The pills they give to zone runners? The 'immunizations' you get when you are inducted in the Hand? confirmation? First communion? Earlier?"

"In utero, but all of those are steps on the path. You can't skip ahead, cut in line so to speak. No one who lives in the yellow zones is completely human. Just think. It took tiberium less than half a century to utterly consume our planet. In terms of geological time that is nearly instantaneous. And even by human standards the infestation is ludicrously virulent. A man can walk through a simple riparius field and be dead before he reaches the other side. This shit swims in our waters. It is in our air. Even the pampered GDI sheep have an exposure level. It is generally well below the Petrova Teratogenic Limit but nearly all zoners have one degree of mutation or another.

"Nobody really noticed it what with the world falling apart and the social order of the old world imploding but when virgin populations were exposed to tiberium there would be a jump in still births and congenital defomity as well as a drop in over all fertility. It was sort of taken for granted that tiberium was bad for you. Keep away from children and pregnant women. The general medical consensus was that if it kills adults dead, it probably isn't too hot for anybody. The really interesting stuff came later. When a generation or two down the line population growth is back on the rise in the tiberium exposed populations.

"Still a lot of tiny coffins but the fertility is no longer taking such a hit. Then you look at the numbers for today and it is almost the same as pre tiberium times. In both Nod and GDI holdings."

Mischa reached out, grasped a MRE wafer and took a wolfish bit.

"What happened?" he said spraying crumbs everywere. "In GDI zones you can claim that it is a blip. A recreation of old world ecology leading to old world growth. But the lands of Nod? That just doesn't hold water."

Xia wasted no time jumping in.

"The Brotherhood has been engineering it's population to be resistant to the effects of tiberium. Right? And no fetus that didn't have some degree of tiberium resitance can even live long enough to be born. Simple natural selection explains the rest."

"It's alot more complex than that," Mischa swallowed noisily and muttered an aside about liquor, "but essentially those are the high points." He held up his hand and began counting on the fingers.

"One, if you aren't resistant to a slight backround level of tiberium you don't get concieved or you die in the womb.

"Two, if you are born in the yellow zones you mother and father likely both are believers and they are already slightly gengineered. The brotherhood offers alot of retroviral patches to the genomes of the faithful and communion is a mild 'anti' tiberoid compound. Even in times of war GDI has sanctioned this on humanitarian levels. They don't really see it as part of a Nod Agenda. They just see it as common sense. As for the faithful. Well, it certainly doesn't hurt the image of the messiah if those who regularly attend at the temple are blessed with longer healthier lives." He chuckled, "As great man once said, 'The thing about the religion of science is..', and I paraphrase '...that by Kane it works.'

"Three, you join the brotherhood proper and now the ultimate goal of divination is no longer even concealed. It's not emphasize as becoming an inhuman cyborg but it is right there out in the open. Actual procedures are routinely performed to give basic enhancile functions. New nerves and eyes for the bikers. Thought to movement stuff and mind machine interfaces for avatar and vertigo pilots." This time he was watching closely and sure as sunrise a small quiver passed across her features. "Various tiberoid drugs that the brothers militant enjoy and lets not forget the holy tinctures and ointments that the Confessors use to bless us before battle. Tiberium exposure in the service is high as a matter of course, but it is higher than it has to be. Fatalities are expected, those that cannot handle the changes and the exposure die, but again, death here is common.

"Four, they just flat out infuse you. Most of those that couldn't handle it have been weeded out by now. Death has culled the population over and over again and only those fit to live in our new eden have survived. They literally pump tiberium into your veins. It is stunning how this can happen to a man and he doesn't make the connection between this and being a mutant. He comes off the table feeling invigorated, his senses are sharper, his hands a little surer and he is told that while tiberium is still bad for him he is going to be resistant to its effect.

"I am at about four and half the induced tiberium mutant who has been delibrately and carefully awakened from mortal form. Through cybernetic surgery and limited, controlled mutation down very deliberate pathways. But still incomplete. Exposure is still bad for me. Just not nearly as it is bad for you and not one ten thousandth as bad as it is for your average blue zone monkey."

"Five would be the true enlightned. A biomechanoid life form capable of coexisting with tiberium with on this waste of a planet." Mischa waggled a sixth finger. An admonishment with his other hand. "The key is not to becoming tiberoid life like the Scrin over here at six. Tiberium addicts. Utterly dependant on it to fuel their most basic functions."

"Heavy shit," Xia exclaimed, "I kinda feel bad. I said we would be going one for one and I just don't have any earth shaking revelations to trade with you. I mean I could give you some lesbian trade secrets but somehow I feel that 101 bedroom tricks of the yaya sisterhood really stacks up against 'soylent green is people'."

Mischa's face took on a perplexed air.

"Soylent green?" he asked.

"It's made of people!" she prompted waving her hands over her head in frantic pantomime. Seeing nothing but empty confusion in her eyes she made a disgusted sound. "How is it that you can be so knowledgable about science and history and not have a decent grasp of classic film!"

"The temple gave us lessons in history, culture and true art." he responded in a vexed tone, "Not in 20th century schlock cinema. If you want a lecture on chinese calligraphy, the impressionist movement or Shostakovitch and his leningrad symphony or you know, any other bit of real art, I would be glad to oblige."

When he uttered the words 'real art' Xia made a sound like a stepped on cat and began gathering air in the manner of a dragon about to expell a righteous firestorm on a particularly deserving knight. However instead of breathing nuclear flame she halted herself at the apex of her fury and made meditative gestures with her hands. Channeling her breath into a deep calming exhalation.

"We, " she said with icy precison, "shall discuss your gross ignorance of the legacy of our forefathers at another juncture. I shall, if we survive, take it upon myself to be your guide from woeful intellectual poverty to the spiritual wealth that cinematic fufillment brings. I suppose that I cannot hold you responsible your deprived childhood and faulty education. I was a very lucky girl. Blessed even. To have the gifts that I had. If anything, I have a moral obligation to bring others up to my level."

"Yes," Mischa said, hiding laughter behind his hands, "that is of course your solemn duty."

Xia rolled her eyes. "You are a savage you know."

"Maybe," Mischa admitted with a grin, "but how on earth did you come to be an expert on turn of the century cinema?"

"Luck." She said. "My parents were both professors, astrophysicists actually. They were originally from Taiwan but met in California while pursuing their doctorates. They got married and ended up emigrating to Sydney when a job offer from the University of New South Wales came up. Eventually they ended up in Indonesia manning the Bosscha Observatory near Jakarta. They managed to instill a desire to learn and a respect for education but failed to convince me that the physical sciences were the be all and end all of learning. I threw myself into popular art and culture as a sort of teen rebellion. And even as late as the thirties we were still hooked into the net, so I had pretty much unlimited media access.

"Bosscha was GDI funded by that point. There was a small but dedicated group of directors within GDI that were concerned with another Tiberium meteor strike." Xia shrugged, "I had a lot to be rebellious about. Mom and pop were both Buddists but Indonesia was primarily Muslim at that point, and if there is one thing that Buddists are good at it is going with the flow." Xia made as if to spit.

"I figured out that I was a lesbian pretty early on but I didn't let on. You see, when I was a teen the Borneo Red Zone was just starting to really consume the south china sea . And where red zones encroach so does Nod. I mentioned before that the primary religion in indonesia was Islam. Well, that was all great when GDI was strong in malaysia. But then most of Indonesia was designated as a yellow zone, which meant that GDI was pulling alot of their forces back to defend the Tibetan, Aussie and Japanese blue zones. However GDI wanted to make sure that their Bosscha research station was left unmolested. So they cut a deal. The local warlord, who basically was a theocrat (or at least paid lip service in that direction) got weapons and funding, and in return he did what he normally would do, which was oppose the brotherhood, and lay off the observatory. A perfect match." She held up her hands and made a clasping gesture to indicate the handshake agreement.

"Noddism doesn't play nice with other religions." Now her hands formed clenched fists and she bumped them together to indicate conflict. "Here in the America's that wasn't a big deal. Most of the older faiths didn't have the spirit or the fanatic base to put up much of a fight. And for those that did... well alot of those American fundamentlists were apocalyptic churches. The Kanite schism essentially created the fourth Abrahamic religion and if you have already accepted an end of the world mentality then the coming of tiberium was a real rapture like moment. Plague from god, White Rider of Conquest and all that. It was an easy transition. Kane was offering answers to the questions people were asking." Xia made an uncovering of the eyes motion.

"Islam and Catholicism were a different story. Both religions quickly found themselves in an uneasy alliance with GDI against the rapidly growing theological menace of Nod. Early on Nod was much more political. It tapped alot of the resentment of the middle east and africa, south america and russia. But as tiberium became more and more a fact of life the spiritual side came to the fore. Islam lost out the worst. Catholicism already had it's hey day and it helped that GDI was primarily a first world coalition, they came from a default christian perspective." Her hands pantomimed the pulling of a rope or carpet.

"Islam lost a huge portion of it's believers before it even had a chance to realize it was being snaked. Nod sold itself as an ally and then as things progressed alot of the Mullahs and Ayatollahs smelled the way the winds were blowing and made a conversion to Noddism. Grabbed a hold of power in the newly emerging Nod theocracy. Those that didn't tended to be part of an already politically powerful theocracy. Like Afganistan, Iran or as is more personally relevant, Indonesia." She tapped her heart.

"I lived on GDI base but we were dependant on the locals for everything. Including unfortunately a social life. If I had been a lesbian on the base then probably nothing would have happened. Mom and dad would have dissapproved in their 'we-are-forward-thinking-educated-people-so-it-isn't-appropriate-for-us-to-be-homophobes-but-we-are-still-repulsed-by-your-behavior' sort of way. But that would have been it. Thing was the entire staff wasn't more than twenty people, and I was the only kid. My choices were to hang out around my parent's wine and cheese peers, lurk around the GDI barracks and the ten lecherous, crude infantry men stationed there or go out into the town to find friends." She made a weighing motion.

"I was very happy to leave the safety of the compound, and the disapproval of my mother and father just made it all the sweeter. I didn't really understand what a risk I was taking. Nod had been creeping down the archipelago and in response the Mullah's had been clamping down. Shariah was fully in force and while headscarves were not really a huge cultural issue, not like it was in the Arabic world, being a queer was. I didn't quite get that if I was caught in flagrante delicto I would be stoned." Her closed fist slammed into her open palm.

"Ever seen a stoning?" she asked.

Mischa nodded slowly.

"I was stationed briefly at a prison camp up in the Canadian Y6 during the third war." he said, " Got to to see a whole lot of interesting death. Most of it involved fire, but the thing about a stoning is that is a great group activity. Spontaneous too." His face crumpled a bit. "I..." he took a breath "...had friends, who were enthusiastic about it."

"Friends?" There was a suddenly venomous edge to Xia's voice. "the sort of friends that perhaps feature in the 'a friend of mine has a problem' sort of converesation?"

Fire flashed in Mischa's eyes and a black hate rushed into his heart. Xia almost blanched with the heat of them, but she stood her ground. She met him ire for ire.

"Their names," he said, each word a cold stone, "were Julian Morales and Tiffany Geller. They were my best..." he stopped and when he started again his voice was softer "they were comrades. They did alot of good things for me. Kept me going in alot of bad times, but they were... believers." His gaze dropped to the floor, confused memories raw with pain swirled behind his eyes. "And not thinking believers, they weren't intellectual people. They weren't even adults. They were stupid children who listened when the confessor told them that infidels aren't people." Mischa's voice became husky, sick memories flickered in his minds eyes. "The sound that a skull makes when it breaks depends on the age and health of the victim. In particular there was one, a sound like stale bread being crushed under a heel that is still with me some nights when I close my eyes."

There was a stony hardening around Xia's eyes and her mouth drew out into a snarl as he spoke but then when his voice started to crack so did her angry mask. Finally as he recounted his nightmares her face fell.

"I'm sorry," She said in a weary voice. "when I was seventeen my second girlfriend and I got caught. We were drunk, which was a big no-no to start with and we were convinced that we were being clever. Nyoman wasn't a beautiful girl and with the benefits of hindsight I can see she was a bit of a self centered airhead, but I was young and she didn't deserve to die. My parents got to learn that I was a lesbian when one of my friends went running back to the GDI compound and told them that me and my girlfriend were about to be stoned.

"The little arrangement between GDI and the local government was enough to get me off with a lighter sentance. Only three lashes. At least that was what I was supposed to get. I ended up getting six, because I couldn't keep my mouth shut." She turned and exposed the long ugly wheals. "I was nearly three months recovering physically. I still don't think that I am over it mentally. They stoned her first, then they flogged me; and no lie, I don't think I even felt it.

"That was my moment of clarity. I didn't immediately fall into the arms of the brotherhood, but I couldn't look at GDI the same way afterward. I blamed them for not saving Nyoman, for allowing the monstrous system that killed her to exist with their tacit approval.

"Things went down hill from there. Red-5 was growing, the local government was collapsing and lines of communication and supply started to break. I saw more and more corruption in the world and I got more and more angry. It all came to a head a few years later. The entire archipelago was a seething mass of conflict." she laughed bitterly. "You know what the best part was? All this was during a time of 'peace'. All around the globe GDI was Spinning down military operations to better focus on preserving their precious blue zones.

"The Brotherhood precipitated the final crisis. The lovely strongman who had been holding this entire mess in a state of precarious balance finally made a misstep. His right hand thug sold him out and a couple shadow teams hit his motorcade and black bagged him. The thug in chief's plan was to supplant the boss as the leader and then negotiate a more concilliatory stance with the brotherhood." Xia folded her hands on her lap and scissored her legs into a lotus posture.

"General Qatar was running the operation via proxy from Ayers and she had different plans. Instead of simply killing el presidente and leaving the situation be, she had the Priors work him over and the hauled the quaking wreck of a man onto a live national broadcast. He sat there for five hours and detailed every little dirty secret of the regime with a capstone announcement that he had been betrayed by his most trusted advisor. Combined with a few well placed bombs, a couple key subversive elememts, and, I learned, years later a few thousand kilos of a mild rage toxin in a few water filtration plants you had an instant civil war.

"The country was ripped apart. It was already desolated by tiberium creep, storm spall and poverty, but there had been something that resembled peace. Someones forces stormed the observatory where my parents were working, they burned it to the ground. Mom made it, a hammerhead evac squad lifted her to Sydney. Dad was killed in the streets of Ledung while trying to find me. To this day I don't know if it was Nod supporters or loyalists. I had already left. I saw this as the inevitable collapse of a rotted tree. I saw it as justice." Xia closed her eyes and leaned back aganst the hard, cold walls of their little shelter.

"I was barely a week and a half on my own before I fucked up again. Got picked up in some in a loyalist sweep. I was dressed immodestly, and they took that as a sign of Nod sympathy. When I was processed my conviction for 'Abberrant Conduct' popped up. That cooked my goose for good. I was stamped an enemy of the state, such as it was, and they threw me in a POW camp." The slender woman slammed her own head once roughly into the wall behind her.

"I spent two years in what I can only describe as hell. There of course were the inevitable indignities that a woman in that circumstance suffers but to be honest I think that the shame didn't hurt quite so much as the pain." She let looses a sudden laugh, high and filled with mirth. "I know. Pain hurts. It seems so silly to say it out loud. But I'll tell you what, I thought I was some hard ass bitch. When they caned my feet it was such a pure agony. I couldn't bear it. I wept and told them anything and everything. But they didn't care to hear me. They didn't really think I knew anything and they didn't want anything but to punish me for my sins and take out their frustrations on a pretty woman.

"It came in cycles. Sometimes I would be left alone for months. Sitting quietly amongst the others. Listening to their litanies to Kane, taking small comfort in the fact that they considered me as one of them. Then I would pluck up my courage and I would try to remind myself that I wasn't broken. I would make some small act of defiance and it would land me back in the hot seat. I always regretted it instantly. I would be broken again in moments. Begging, pleading, reduced. But they wouldn't let me go that easily. Eventually they would get bored and I would be thrown back into the general population.

"Strange as it might sound, as pathetic ashamed of myself I felt I was a bit of a minor celebrity amongst the other prisoners. They only saw me defiant before and beaten after. They never got to see me weep. They always assumed that I was in the hot seat as long as I was because I was resisting. It never occured to them that it was the whims of our jailors that kept me."

Mischa could feel strange sympathy beating in his chest as he listened to Xia speak. She wasn't hurt in the same way as him, she hadn't been through what he had. But the mere fact that she was damaged made her kin to him. She opened her eyes before she continued, there was a light in them now, like she was emerging from a long tunnel.

"She came for me in the third month of my second year in hell. It was quite the dramatic entrance. I was in the pokey again, more misbehavior, more stupidity. The professional sadists had my clit hooked up to lantern battery and were having a grand old time. I was past even begging. All I was doing was screaming and cursing.

"Next thing I know the entire world has turned sideways and there is fire everywhere. A slim fuzzy shadow that hurts to look at is sharing the room with me and my two best friends. I get maybe a quarter second to process this before the lazarus shielding on the shadow operative cuts back in and the rest of it is blood and screaming. Just this time, it isn't me.

"Leslie could have probably just used a shredder to mince my jailors but in some strange way I think she was angrier about the whole situation than I was. Her shadow team had recieved information on a bunch of Nod prisoners and had arranged for a strike to rescue key personel. They had arrived, and upon scouting the place found out that it wasn't just a prison, it was as I told you, a hell. The shadow team commander, a very soft spoken and paradoxically shy man named Calvin, changed the mission profile on the fly. It was still going to be an extraction for key figures, but it was also going to be a search and destroy. Brother-Captain Calvin made a proclamation to his team before they moved in. He said and this is a direct quote, 'if a single human being who had a part in the creation or operation of this place is alive come sunrise I will be sorely dissapointed.'

"True to his promise the team butchered everyone. They blew the walls down at about twenty one hundred hours and had secured the priority prisoner as well as neutrilized all major pockets of resistance well before midnight. They however didn't stop killing until about three fourty five in the morning. Leslie took my two 'friends' apart in front of me. She used a knife, one of those really nasty scorpion warblades. The one that produce the paralytic neurotoxin. Then she unties me, tends to my wounds, wraps me in a blanket and carrys me out of there in her arms." Xia shook her head in a rueful manner, grinning ear to ear.

"My celebrity status among the other prisoners apparently rated me as a priority. I was considered a high value target. Not because Nod thought I was someone important, or rather, not because they mistook me for a high ranking sister, rather they took me because they felt I was worthy." She suddenly stopped. Mischa could see tears starting to form in her eyes. He was still. He didn't want to acknowledge this crack until she did. She sniffed twice and then took a deep breath and continued.

"I took my vows as a sister of nod pretty much as soon as I could speak. Leslie was my sponsor and pretty soon my wife. I'll skip over the details of our courtship but Leslie and I were married less than two months later. Brother-Captain Calvin performed the ceremony. I joined with his unit and pretty quickly found myself swept up in the war effort. Learned alot. Fought alot. Found out that I had pretty decent skills when it came to soldiering. I ended up knee deep in the third war. Never right at the center but always in one theatre or another. I was in Japan when they fired the opening salvo against the Phillidelphia and I was in South Ameican during temple prime fiasco." Xia's face went flat and her voice became wooden. "Our ultimate commander was Killian Qatar and we ended up at Ayers rock when the scrin came raining down. Leslie was killed by our one of our own during the schism at the rock" Her voice had become soulless but still she spoke.

"For seven years I was certain. Certain that the path of Nod was the righteous path. When Leslie died over a factional squabble I don't think a more devastating blow to my certainty could have been dealt. I fought the scrin because at the time all that mattered was that I keep moving forward. When the dust had settled and there was no more fighting left to be done I had to face myself and I found that to be impossible. So I went to my Brother-Captain and I confessed my doubt. I asked him to send me away. I told him that I didn't care where, just that I couldn't bear to be around my brothers and sisters. He was understanding. Kind even. He said that he knew just the thing. A new place. A new cabal. A new mission."

Mischa spoke. "He sent you too Ezekiel." It was not a question

"Eventually. This is my third long range detached deployment in Y-6. I choose new cabals each time." Some small measure of life crept back into her voice. "Wouldn't do to get too attached would it?"

"No," said Mischa, "I suppose it wouldn't.


End file.
